title: Mother India

text: Mother India is a 1957 Indian epic drama film, directed by Mehboob Khan and starring Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar and Raaj Kumar. A remake of Khan's earlier film "Aurat" (1940), it is the story of a poverty-stricken village woman named Radha (Nargis), who in the absence of her husband, struggles to raise her sons and survive against a cunning money-lender amidst many troubles.


title: Mother India

text: The title of the film was chosen to counter American author Katherine Mayo's 1927 polemical book "Mother India", which vilified Indian culture. "Mother India" metaphorically represents India as a nation in the aftermath of its independence in 1947, and alludes to a strong sense of Indian nationalism and nation-building. Allusions to Hindu mythology are abundant in the film, and its lead character has been seen as a metonymic representation of an Indian woman who reflects high moral values and the concept of what it means to be a mother to society through self-sacrifice. While some authors treat Radha as the symbol of women empowerment, others see her cast in female stereotypes. The film was shot in Mumbai's Mehboob Studios and in the villages of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh. The music by Naushad introduced global music, including Western classical music and orchestra, to Hindi cinema.


title: Mother India

text: The film was one of the most expensive Indian (Bollywood) productions and earned the highest revenue for any Indian film at that time. Adjusted for inflation, "Mother India" still ranks among the all-time Indian box office hits. It was released in India amid fanfare in October 1957 and had several high-profile screenings, including one at the capital, New Delhi, attended by the country's president and prime minister. "Mother India" became a definitive cultural classic and is regarded as one of the best films in Indian cinema. The film won the All India Certificate of Merit for Best Feature Film, the Filmfare Best Film Award for 1957, and Nargis and Khan won the Best Actress and Best Director awards respectively. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, becoming the first Indian film to be ever nominated.


title: Mother India

text: The film opens in the year 1957, the present day at the time of filming. When construction of an irrigation canal to the village is completed, Radha (Nargis), considered to be the "mother" of the village, is asked to inaugurate the canal. She remembers her past when she was newly married.


title: Mother India

text: The wedding between Radha and Shamu (Raaj Kumar) is paid for by Radha's mother-in-law, who borrows the money from the moneylender Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal). The conditions of the loan are disputed, but the village elders decide in favour of the moneylender, after which Shamu and Radha are forced to pay three-quarters of their crop as interest on the loan of 500 (valued at about US$105 in 1957). While Shamu works to bring more of their rocky land into use, his arms are crushed by a boulder. Ashamed of his helplessness (being without arms), and humiliated by Sukhilala for living on the earnings of his wife, Shamu decides that he is of no use to his family and permanently leaves Radha and their three sons, walking to his own probable death by starvation. Soon after, Radha's youngest son and her mother-in-law die. A severe storm and the resulting flood destroys houses in the village and ruins the harvest. Sukhilala offers to save Radha and her sons if she trades her body to him for food. Radha vehemently refuses his offer but has to also lose her infant (her fourth son) to the atrocities of the storm. Although the villagers begin initially to evacuate the village, they decide to stay and rebuild it, persuaded by Radha.


title: Mother India

text: Several years later, Radha's two surviving children, Birju (Sunil Dutt) and Ramu (Rajendra Kumar) are young men. Birju, embittered since childhood by the demands of Sukhilala, takes out his frustrations by pestering the village girls, especially Sukhilala's daughter, Rupa. Ramu, by contrast, has a calmer temperament and is married soon after. Birju's anger finally becomes dangerous and, after being provoked, he attacks Sukhilala and his daughter and steals Radha's "kangan" (marriage bracelets) that were pawned with Sukhilala. He is chased out of the village and becomes a bandit. Radha promises Sukhilala that she will not let Birju cause harm to Sukhilala's family. On Rupa's wedding day, Birju returns with his gang of bandits to exact his revenge. He kills Sukhilala and kidnaps Rupa. When he tries to flee the village on his horse, Radha, his mother, shoots him. He dies in her arms. The film returns to 1957, the present day; Radha opens the gate of the canal and its reddish water flows into the fields.


title: Mother India

text: The title "Mother India" was inspired by American author Katherine Mayo's 1927 polemical book of the same name, in which she attacked Indian society, religion and culture. Written against the Indian demands for self-rule and independence from British rule, the book pointed to the treatment of India's women, the untouchables, animals, dirt, and the character of its nationalistic politicians. Mayo singled out what she thought to be the rampant and fatally weakening sexuality of its males to be at the core of all problems, allegedly leading to masturbation, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, venereal diseases, and, particularly, premature sexual intercourse and maternity. The book created an outrage across India, and it was burned along with her effigy. It was criticised by Mahatma Gandhi as a "report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon". The book prompted over fifty angry books and pamphlets to be published to highlight Mayo's errors and false perception of Indian society, which had become a powerful influence on the American people's view of India.


title: Mother India

text: Mehboob Khan had the idea for the film and the title as early as 1952, five years after India's independence; in October that year, he approached the import authorities of the Indian government to seek permission for importing raw stocks for the film. In 1955, the ministries of External Affairs and Information-and-Broadcasting learned of the title of the forthcoming film and demanded that the director send them the script for review, suspicious that it was based on the book and thus a possible threat to the national interest. The film team dispatched the script along with a two-page letter on 17 September 1955 saying:


title: Mother India

text: Khan was inspired by American author Pearl S. Buck and her books "The Good Earth" (1931) and "The Mother" (1934); he also saw the film "The Good Earth" (1937), directed by Sidney Franklin. "The Mother" chronicled the life of a Chinese woman, including her married life and lonely struggle after being abandoned by her husband. Aspects of "Mother India", such as moneylenders, toiling on land, and rearing children through hardship were part of the story. Khan originally drew upon these influences in making his 1940 film "Aurat", the original version of "Mother India". Khan bought the rights of "Aurat" from the production company National Studios for 35,000 (valued at about US$7,350 in 1957). Stylistic elements of "Mother India" show similarities with Vsevolod Pudovkin's Soviet silent film "Mother" (1926); "Our Daily Bread" (1934), directed by King Vidor; and films of Alexander Dovzhenko. Certain imagery in the film, such as "happy farmers, sickles in their hand, smiling from behind ripening crops", resemble posters by Soviet constructivist artists.


title: Mother India

text: The script of "Aurat" was devised by Wajahat Mirza, based upon a story by Babubhai Mehta. For "Mother India", it was reworked by Mirza and the young screenwriter S. Ali Raza. Apart from Mehboob Khan, Mirza and Raza, prominent screenwriters Aghajani Kashmeri, Zia Sarhadi, Akhtar Mirza, music director Naushad, assistant director Chimankant Desai and many others were consulted. The dialogue, reworked by Mirza and Raza, is a blend of Urdu, vernacular Hindi, and its literary counterpart. As Mirza and Raza were from the Urdu literary tradition, they wrote the dialogues in Urdu script.


title: Mother India

text: The script was intentionally written in a way that promoted the empowerment of women in Indian society (including the power to resist sexual advances) and the maintenance of a sense of moral dignity and purpose as individuals; this was contrary to what Mayo had claimed in her book. These themes, present in "Aurat", were further developed with a strong sense of nationalism and nation-building, using characters personifying abstract qualities such as "beauty and goodness, wealth and power, poverty and exploitation, and community spirit".


title: Mother India

text: Nargis was the director's first choice for the role of Radha, and despite only being aged 26 at the time, she played the new wife, young single mother and an aged mother of two sons. Nargis—the reigning queen of Hindi cinema at the time—had started her career in a leading role with Khan's "Taqdeer" (1943) and acted under his direction in "Humayun" (1945) and "Andaz" (1949). "Mother India" is generally regarded as Nargis's best performance and was her last major film before retirement after marriage.


title: Mother India

text: Khan had wanted to cast Sabu Dastagir, a Hollywood star of Indian origin, as Birju. Dastagir travelled to India from Los Angeles, stayed in a hotel in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) and received a retainer. However, delays and obstacles in beginning shooting and getting a work permit for Dastagir led to his dismissal from the project. Dilip Kumar, an established actor in the Hindi film industry, had originally expressed an interest in playing Birju, which Khan found agreeable; Dilip Kumar agreed to play Shamu as well. However, Nargis objected that the public would not accept their casting as mother and son because she had done several romantic films alongside him. Sunil Dutt—with the experience of just one film—was finally cast, after Mukri, a comedian in the film, introduced him to Khan. Sajid Khan, the actor who portrayed the young Birju, was unknown at the time and was from a poor family from the Mumbai slums. Sajid's salary in the film was 750. He was later adopted by Mehboob Khan. Subsequently, Raaj Kumar was cast as Shamu and Rajendra Kumar as Ramu. "Mother India" was the first successful film and a turning point in the careers of Dutt, Raaj Kumar and Rajendra Kumar.


title: Mother India

text: Before principal photography began, Nargis and Raaj Kumar familiarised themselves with farming practices such as ploughing the fields, reaping and sowing, and cotton picking. The extras in the song and dance sequences of the film were from local dance groups in villages where the shooting took place instead of the usual ones from Mumbai.


title: Mother India

text: The initial filming for "Mother India" began unexpectedly, even before the script and cast were finalised. In 1955, parts of Uttar Pradesh suffered from major flooding. Cinematographer Faredoon Irani travelled to flood-afflicted districts to shoot generic flood scenes. The scheduled principal photography started in 1955 with a budget of (approximately $525,000 in 1957). However, the budget increased by to (approximately in 1957) by the end of the filming because of the outdoor sessions and cast and crew's salaries.


title: Mother India

text: Several indoor scenes for the film were shot in 1956 at Mehboob Studios in Bandra, Mumbai. Khan and Irani attempted to shoot frequently on location to make the film as realistic as possible. Locations included various villages in Maharashtra, Gujarat (Maharashtra and Gujarat together formed Bombay State then) and Uttar Pradesh. The film was shot in 35mm. Contemporary cinematographer Anil Mehta has noted the mastery of Irani's cinematic techniques in shooting the film, including his "intricate tracks and pans, the detailed mise en scène patterns Irani conceived, even for brief shots—in the studios as well as on location". The film took about three years to make, from early organisation, planning, and scripting to completion of filming. In a November 1956 interview, Nargis described the film shoot and her role as the most demanding of her career. "Mother India" was shot in Gevacolor, later converted to Technicolor. It was shot mostly using the sync sound technique, which was common at the time; some scenes were dubbed.


title: Mother India

text: For shooting the flood scene, a farmer agreed to flood of his land. In the exodus scene following the flood, 300 bullock carts, 200 farmers and many horses, tractors and ploughs were used. Gayatri Chatterjee writes about the popular belief that all these were made available by villagers without reimbursement, in her book. However, account ledgers of the production revealed that the villagers were paid. There was a protracted scene in the film in which Radha runs between burning haystacks in search for her son Birju, a renegade bandit, who was hiding there. The fire scene was shot in the Umra area of Surat, Gujarat, by burning bales of hay. Nargis and Dutt acted in the fire scene without doubles. On 1 March 1957, an accident occurred during the fire scene when the wind direction changed and the fire grew out of control, trapping Nargis. She was saved by Dutt, who quickly grabbed a blanket, plunged inside, and rescued her. Shooting halted temporarily as both had sustained injuries. Dutt was hospitalised for the burns and Nargis helped nurse him, at Khan's place in Billimora. Nargis—a popular actress at the time—fell in love with Dutt, who was in early stages of his film career and played her son in the film; they married on 11 March 1958. Nargis wished to marry soon after the film, but Khan protested that real-life marriage of the onscreen mother-son would be disastrous for the film. Owing to their relationship, Nargis also found it difficult to perform a scene where she beat Dutt with a lathi.


title: Mother India

text: Various authors identify the character of Radha with Hindu mythological goddesses and characters, such as Radha (the lover of the god Krishna, personifying love and romance), Sita (the divine heroine of the Hindu epic "Ramayana", personifying high moral value), Savitri (representing great morality and loyalty to husband), Draupadi (personifying duty and morality), Dharti-mata (earth-mother goddess) and Lakshmi (Hindu goddess of prosperity). Besides these gentle goddesses, the character of Radha has shades of more ferocious warrior goddesses such as Durga and Kali. Film scholars have compared the mild-mannered, obedient son Ramu with the god Rama of the epic "Ramayana", and the romantic outlaw Birju—a name of Krishna—with the god Krishna, known for his transgressions. Shamu (another name of Krishna), Radha's husband who leaves her, is also equated with Krishna, who left his lover Radha in mythological accounts. The title "Mother India" and Radha's character are described to be allusions not only to the Hindu Mother Goddess, but also to Bharat Mata (literally "Mother India"), the national personification of India, generally represented as a Hindu goddess.


title: Mother India

text: According to professor Nalini Natarajan of the University of Puerto Rico, Nargis's Mother India is a metonymic representation of a Hindu woman, reflecting high Hindu values, with virtuous morality and motherly self-sacrifice. Film scholar Jyotika Virdi wrote that "Mother India" could also be seen as a metaphor of the trinity of mother, God, and a dynamic nation. Vijay Mishra, in his 2002 book "Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire", opined that the Mother India figure is an icon in several respects—being associated with a goddess, her function as a wife, as a lover, and even compromising her femininity at the end of the film by playing Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, masculine gods.


title: Mother India

text: According to Indian film scholars Gokulsing and Dissanayake, while aspiring to traditional Hindu values, the character of Mother India also represents the changing role of the mother in Indian cinema and society in that the mother is not always subservient or dependent on her husband, refining the relationship to the male gender or patriarchal social structures. The "New Internationalist" said in a 1999 review that Radha transforms from a submissive wife to an independent mother, thereby breaking female stereotypes in Hindi film. In contrast, in a 2012 article in the newspaper "The Hindu", author Tarini Sridharan has pointed out themes such as upholding female chastity, wifely devotion and saintly motherhood that reinforce gender stereotypes. While the action of sacrificing motherhood to uphold a woman's dignity is termed as feminist by some, other authors see it as an attempt of a community woman to protect the patriarchal village structure, that esteems "izzat" (honour) of women. A promotional pamphlet to introduce the social context of the film to western audiences described Indian women as being "an altar in India", and that Indians "measure the virtue of their race by the chastity of their women", and that "Indian mothers are the nucleus around which revolve the tradition and culture of ages."


title: Mother India

text: In a 2002 review in "The New York Times", film critic Dave Kehr compares the film with "Stella Dallas" (1937) for the thematic similarity of the series of sacrifices made by the female lead, and with "Gone with the Wind" (1939) as an epic mirroring social upheavals. Film critic Mark Cousins and author Tejaswini Ganti agree that the film is the "Gone with the Wind" of Indian cinema.


title: Mother India

text: The term "Mother India" has been defined as "a common icon for the emergent Indian nation in the early 20th  century in both colonialist and nationalist discourse". Many authors, including Gayatri Chatterjee, author of "Mother India" (2002), interpret the film as an allegory signifying patriotism and the changing situation in the newly independent nation, and how India was functioning without British authority. It echoes the tale of a modern India, liberating itself from "feudal and colonial oppression". The film, an archetypal nationalistic picture, is symbolic in that it demonstrated the euphoria of "Mother India" in a nation that had only been independent for 10 years, and it had a long-lasting cultural impact upon the Indian people. Film scholar Saibal Chatterjee considers "Mother India" a "mirror of independent India", highlighting problems of a nascent nation, including rural exploitation of farmers by money-lenders, in a dramatic fashion understandable to the common viewer. It also represents the agrarian poverty and hardship of the people at the time. The red water that flows from the canal irrigating the green fields at the end of the film is seen by Chatterjee as a metaphor to represent the blood of Indians in the struggle for independence, flowing to nourish a new free India. The canal is described by Virdi to signal the imminent end of the feudal order. However, despite Radha's struggle against feudal oppression depicted in the film, her action of stopping the rebellious Birju and upholding status quo—the feudal and patriarchal order—is seen as "regressive" by various authors.


title: Mother India

text: In a study of media and popular culture in South Asia, author Mahasveta Barua draws a parallel between the film's metaphorical representation of the mother as a nation, and the metonymic identification with India that Indira Gandhi, India's only woman prime minister, sought and tried for during her tenure (1966–77, and 1980–84). In his book "Terrorism, Media, Liberation", John David Slocum argues that like Satyajit Ray's classic masterpiece "Pather Panchali" (1955), Khan's "Mother India" has "vied for alternative definitions of Indianness". However, he emphasises that the film is an overt mythologising and feminising of the nation in which Indian audiences have used their imagination to define it in the nationalistic context, given that in reality, the storyline is about a poverty-stricken peasant from northern India, rather than a true idea of a modernising, powerful nation.


title: Mother India

text: The Radha–Birju relationship is described to have "Oedipal elements" by many authors; Virdi has argued that in her chastity, Radha channels her sexual desires into maternal love for her sons who effectively become "substitute erotic subjects". Mishra opines that the crushing of the arms of Radha's husband and the mellowness of the older son symbolise castration, which is in contrast with the rebellion of Birju, identified with sexual potency. Birju's obsession with his mother's bracelets is an expression of his oedipal longings, according to Chakravarty. Rachel Dwyer, Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, describes how "suspiciously smoothly" the Oedipal elements fit into the film and the off-screen romance between Nargis and Dutt, playing mother and son in the film. Radha's actions at the end of the film in shooting her own son was a breaking of traditional mother-son relationship to safeguard morality, according to author William Van der Heide. Virdi points out that this brought ambiguity to the mother figure who acts as a sacrificing provider and also as a destroyer, annihilating her own son, something rare in Hindi cinema. She interprets Birju's sexual advances on a village girl (which is incest in north Indian village culture) as being a substitute in the plot for the incestuous mother-son relationship and his death at the end as a punishment for violation of the taboo.


title: Mother India

text: Authors such as Eshun and Woods state that Radha and Ramu are the archetypal champions of virtue in battling hardship and injustice, while Birju is a mischievous child who becomes the anarchist whose uncontrollable rebellion destroys order. Mishra has noted that although Radha upholds "Dharma" (the natural law or order) in the film, it is Birju who achieves identification from the spectators; in his rebellion lies the agenda of political action that will usher social change. Mishra notes that due to such conflicting ideas, the film is very much conforming, and yet "defiantly subversive".


title: Mother India

text: Film scholar Vijay Mishra has pointed out the presence of the "highly syncretic hyphenated Hindu–Muslim nature" of Bollywood in the film. Parama Roy has interpreted that Nargis's legendary status as the titular "Mother India" is due to Hinduisation of the role and her real-life marriage with a Hindu; she is, according to Roy, scripted as a renouncer of Muslim separatism in the film. Mishra has found metacritical value in Salman Rushdie's commentary on the film in his novel "The Moor's Last Sigh" (1995) in which Rushdie describes:


title: Mother India

text: The production team had planned to release "Mother India" to commemorate the tenth anniversary of India's independence on 15 August 1957, but the film was released over two months later. It premiered at the Liberty Cinema in Mumbai on 25 October 1957, during Diwali; it ran continuously at Liberty for over a year. It was released in Kolkata (then called Calcutta) the same day and in Delhi a week later. It had reached all regions of India by the end of November. Government ministers and other officials were invited to the premieres, and a special screening was held in Rashtrapati Bhavan (the presidential quarter) in New Delhi on 23 October 1957; the event was attended by President Rajendra Prasad, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi. Chief Minister of West Bengal Bidhan Chandra Roy and Governor Padmaja Naidu attended a screening in Kolkata. Impressed with the film's nationalistic message, Chief Minister of Bombay State Morarji Desai granted it an exemption from the entertainment tax in the state.


title: Mother India

text: No reliable data is available on the box office earnings of "Mother India". It was in continuous distribution in theatres in India until the mid-1990s. There was a renewed interest in the film in the 1970s causing an upsurge in ticket sales. According to Chatterjee, it did exceptionally good business in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka (then called Mysore State) and Maharashtra. Film trade websites provide estimates of its business. Box Office India gave the film's net collection as and its gross as , the highest for an Indian film up until "Mughal-e-Azam" (1960), while estimating that "Mother India"s inflation-adjusted net would be equivalent to in January 2008. Box Office India later estimated in 2017 that "Mother India" had over 100million footfalls at the domestic box office, making it one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time when adjusted for inflation. The film's success led Khan to name his next film "Son of India". Released in 1962, it was not well received.


title: Mother India

text: "Mother India" was dubbed in several European languages including Spanish, French and Russian; it did substantial business in Greece, Spain and Russia and was released in the Eastern Bloc countries. Technicolor arranged one screening of the film in Paris on 30 June 1958, under the name "Les bracelets d'or" ("The Gold Bracelets"). It did minimal business in Paris, but fared better in French colonies. It was successful in the Latin American countries of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. "Mother India" was also acclaimed across the Arab world, in the Middle East, parts of Southeast Asia, and North Africa and continued to be shown in countries such as Algeria at least ten years after its release. It was released in the US on 9 July 1959 to lukewarm response, and the UK release in 1961 was also a commercial failure. The initial international version with English subtitles was 40 minutes shorter than the Indian release.


title: Mother India

text: As of 2013, "Mother India" is available on DVD in all regions NTSC format, distributed by the Eros Entertainment.


title: Mother India

text: A contemporary review in "Filmfare" praised the cast's enthusiastic performances and said that the film "will be remembered for a long time to come". Baburao Patel of "Filmindia" (December 1957) described "Mother India" after its release as "the greatest picture produced in India" and wrote that no other actress would have been able to perform the role as well as Nargis. A review in a British magazine "Monthly Film Bulletin" in 1958 remarked that audiences in UK should be grateful that the international version was shortened by 40 minutes, and termed it a "rag-bag pantomime". After its US release in 1959, Irene Thirer reviewed the film in the "New York Post" in which she praised its "striking dramatic appeal", but feared it might not be accepted by American audiences due to cultural differences. In a 1976 article in the journal "Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review", author Michael Gallagher found the film "an amazing mixture of political allegory and cheap musical, a cross between the impressiveness of Eisenstein and the banality of "Show Boat"". The "New Internationalist" in 1999 found Nargis's acting "exemplary", and noted "a clever interplay—artistically and politically—between the traditional and the radical" evident in "Mother India".


title: Mother India

text: In a 2002 article in "The Village Voice", film critic J. Hoberman described the film as "an outrageous "masala" of apparently discordant elements." He characterised it as a mixture of "indigenous versions of Soviet-style tractor-opera, Italian neo-realism, Hollywood kiddie-cuteness, a dozen Technicolor musical numbers, and, most significantly, a metaphoric overlay of pop Hinduism." Hoberman criticised the acting as "broad", and also wrote about the "vaguely left-wing" nationalist overtone of the film. Phill Hall, writing for "Film Threat" in 2002, described the film as exceptionally sluggish and one-dimensional, and lampooned it saying "it takes the strongest of constitutions to endure this film without entertaining notions of matricide." Jonathan Romney of "The Independent" observed the earth-mother Radha as "India's answer to Anna Magnani" and the film as "an all-out exercise in ideological myth-making." "Women's Feature Service", in a 2007 article, noted "Mother India" as "one of the most outstanding films of the post-Independence era." Ziya Us Salam of "The Hindu" wrote in 2010: "Mehboob was able to blend the individual with the universal, thereby enhancing the film's appeal without compromising on its sensitivity."


title: Mother India

text: "Mother India", Nargis, and Mehboob Khan received many awards and nominations. Nargis won the Filmfare Best Actress Award in 1958 and became the first Indian to receive the Best Actress award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in present-day Czech Republic. "Mother India" won the Filmfare Award for Best Film and scooped several other Filmfare awards including Best Director for Khan, Best Cinematographer for Faredoon Irani, and Best Sound for R. Kaushik. In 1958, the film became India's first submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was chosen as one of the five nominations for the category. The international version, 120 minutes long, was sent for the Oscars. Additionally, this version had English subtitles, and dropped Mehboob Productions' logo, which featured the Communist hammer and sickle, to appease the Academy. The 120-minute version was later distributed in the US and UK by Columbia Pictures. The film came close to winning the Academy Award but lost to Federico Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria" by a single vote. Khan was utterly disappointed at not winning the award. "He had seen the other films in the fray and believed "Mother India" was far superior to them" recalled Sunil Dutt decades later. It also won two awards at the 5th National Film Awards in 1957: an All India Certificate of Merit for Best Feature Film and Certificate of Merit for Best Feature Film in Hindi.


title: Mother India

text: The score and soundtrack for "Mother India" were composed by Naushad. Mehboob Khan had worked on eight  films with Naushad and developed a rapport with him. The lyrics were by Shakeel Badayuni. The soundtrack consists of 12 songs and features vocals by Mohammed Rafi, Shamshad Begum, Lata Mangeshkar, and Manna Dey. It was not particularly well-received upon release, and critics said it did not match the high pitch and quality of the film. However, its later reception has been more positive: the soundtrack made Planet Bollywood's list of "100 Greatest Bollywood Soundtracks Ever", compiled in the 2000s. The review gave the album 7.5 stars out of 10.


title: Mother India

text: "Mother India" is the earliest example of a Hindi film containing Western classical music and Hollywood-style orchestra. An example is a coda during the scene in which Birju runs away from his mother and rejects her. It features a powerful symphonic orchestra with strings, woodwinds and trumpets. This orchestral music contains extensive chromaticism, diminished sevenths, and augmented scales. It also features violin tremolos. Anne Morcom writes in "Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema" that the piece is unmelodic and "profoundly disturbing". This use of a western-style orchestra in Indian cinema influenced many later films, such as "Mughal-e-Azam" (1960), which features similar dissonant orchestral music to create the atmosphere at tense moments. The song "Holi Aayi Re Kanhai", sung by Shamshad Begum, and dance by Sitaradevi has been cited as a typical Hindi film song which is written for and sung by a female singer, with an emotional charge that appeals to a mass audience.


title: Mother India

text: "Mother India" has been described as "perhaps India's most revered film", a "cinematic epic", a "flag-bearer of Hindi cinema and a legend in its own right", Mehboob Khan's "magnum opus" and an "all-time blockbuster", which ranks highly among India's most successful films. It was in continuous distribution, being played in theatres for more than three decades; the record ended in the mid-1990s with the advent of satellite television and a change in Indian film-viewing habits. "Mother India" belongs to only a small collection of films, including "Kismet" (1943), "Mughal-e-Azam" (1960), "Sholay" (1975) "Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!" (1994), and "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" (1995) which are repeatedly watched throughout India and are viewed as definitive Hindi films with cultural significance. It is also among the only three Indian films to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (the others being "Salaam Bombay!" and "Lagaan"). The "Hindustan Times" (in 2007) identifies the "film's pungent social references" which are "too harsh to be sold at a profit today. But this heartrending tale filled Indians with hope and pride then." The film was remade in the Telugu language as "Bangaru Talli" in 1971, and in Tamil as "Punniya Boomi" in 1978.


title: Mother India

text: "Mother India" is ranked No. 80 in "Empire" magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. It is listed among the only three Hindi films in the book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" (the others being "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" and "Deewaar"). Film critic Anupama Chopra included it in her list of top 100 films in world cinema. In 2005, Indiatimes Movies ranked the film amongst the "Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films". It was ranked third in the British Film Institute's 2002 poll of "Top 10 Indian Films". It was also included in "TIME"s list of the best Bollywood classics in 2010, and in CNN-IBN's list of the "100 greatest Indian films of all time" in 2013. The film was premiered in the "Cannes Classics" section of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.


title: Mother India

text: Rajeev Masand of CNN-IBN notes that "Mother India" "didn't just put India on the world map, it also defined Hindi cinema for decades that followed." Film critic Dave Kehr agrees that it influenced Indian films for the next 50 years. A 1983 Channel 4 documentary on Hindi cinema describes the film as setting a benchmark in Indian cinema. The shooting stance of Nargis at the end of the film is one of the all-time iconic images of Hindi cinema. Other iconic scenes include Radha pulling the plough through the field (see film poster at the top) and feeding chapatis to her two sons as they pull the plough. The "Hindustan Times" states that Nargis symbolised mothers in "which all the mothers [in later films] had the same clichéd roles to play. Representing both motherhood and Mother Earth, who also nurtures and occasionally punishes, Nargis immortalised the Indian mother on celluloid." The film pioneered the portrayal of two morally opposed brothers personifying good and evil, which became a repeated motif in Hindi films, including "Gunga Jumna" (1961) and "Deewaar" (1975). The rebellious Birju also inspired the "angry young man" stock character that arose in 1970s Hindi cinema. According to scholar Brigitte Schulze, "Mother India" played a key role in shaping the young Republic of India's national identity in its early years following independence from the British Raj, due to how the film was able to successfully convey a sense of Indian nationalism to the urban and rural masses.


title: Byron White

text: Byron "Whizzer" Raymond White (June 8, 1917 April 15, 2002) was an American professional football player and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1962 until his retirement in 1993.


title: Byron White

text: Born and raised in Colorado, White played college football, basketball, and baseball for the University of Colorado, finishing as a consensus All-American and the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy in 1937. He was the fourth overall selection of the 1938 NFL Draft—taken by the Pittsburgh Pirates—and led the National Football League in rushing yards in his rookie season. White spent a year at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before his admission to Yale Law School in 1939, during which period he played for the Detroit Lions in the 1940 and 1941 seasons while still attending law school. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer with the United States Navy in the Pacific Theatre. After the war, he graduated from Yale Law School ranked first in his class and clerked for Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson.


title: Byron White

text: White entered private practice in Denver, working primarily as a transactional attorney. He served as the Colorado state chair of John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign and accepted appointment as the U.S. Deputy Attorney General in 1961. The next year, President Kennedy successfully nominated White to the Supreme Court where he became its first justice from Colorado. He retired in 1993 and was succeeded by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


title: Byron White

text: White viewed his own court decisions as based on the facts of each case rather than as representative of a specific legal philosophy. He wrote the majority opinion in cases including "Coker v. Georgia", "Washington v. Davis" and "Bowers v. Hardwick". He wrote dissenting opinions in notable cases such as "Miranda v. Arizona", "Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha", "NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma", and "Roe v. Wade".


title: Byron White

text: Byron Raymond White was born in Fort Collins, Colorado on June 8, 1917; he was the younger son of Maude Elizabeth (née Burger) and Alpha Albert White. Despite being poor German settlers that never attended high school, White's parents placed an emphasis on his education and were active in the local community. Both White and his brother, Clayton "Sam" Samuel White, were raised in the nearby town of Wellington where they attended the local high school. As a young student, White worked odd jobs to support his family during the town's decline in the 1920s. In his junior year, he and his brother rented out land and spent long hours in the fields, during which time White adopted a lifelong habit of smoking. Sam, four years White's senior, was himself an accomplished student and athlete that graduated as valedictorian, earning a scholarship to study at the University of Colorado where he was later elected by the university to become a Rhodes scholar.


title: Byron White

text: White excelled academically in high school, graduating as the class valedictorian of his small class of six with the highest grades in the school's history. He followed his brother's footsteps and attended the University of Colorado Boulder on the scholarship offered to all Colorado high school valedictorians. After the news of his brother's success became a local sensation, White saw his brother as an inspiration and felt pressured to excel academically. He joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and served as student body president his senior year. White graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian from the University of Colorado in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He then won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford in England; after deferring it for a year to play pro football, he then attended Hertford College, Oxford. During his time in England, White became acquainted with Joe and Jack Kennedy, as their father Joseph Kennedy was the U.S. ambassador to London.


title: Byron White

text: White was an All-American halfback for the Colorado Buffaloes, where a newspaper columnist gave him the nickname "Whizzer", which to his chagrin followed him throughout his legal career. As a senior, White led the 1937 Colorado Buffaloes football team to an undefeated 8–0 regular season, but they lost to favored Rice, 28–14 in the Cotton Bowl Classic on New Year's Day. He was the runner-up (behind Yale quarterback Clint Frank) for the Heisman Trophy, and also played basketball and baseball at CU. The basketball team advanced to the finals of the inaugural National Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden in March 1938.


title: Byron White

text: White originally planned to attend Oxford in 1938 and not play pro football. He was selected fourth overall in the 1938 NFL draft, held in December 1937, by the NFL's Pittsburgh Pirates (now Steelers), and became a Rhodes Scholar days later. Oxford allowed White to delay his start to early 1939, so he accepted the Pittsburgh offer in August and played the 1938 season in the NFL. He led the league in rushing as a 21-year-old rookie and was its highest-paid player. He sailed to England in early 1939, with the intent of staying for three years.


title: Byron White

text: With the outbreak of World War II in late summer, White returned to the United States. He later enrolled at Yale Law School in 1939. In a 2000 interview, White said that he was supposed to enroll at Harvard Law School, but got sick on the train ride there, so he got off the train in New Haven, Connecticut and went to Yale. White earned the highest grades in the first-year class, but he turned down an editorship of the "Yale Law Journal" and took a leave of absence to play football with the Detroit Lions, again leading the league in rushing in 1940. In three NFL seasons, he played in 33 games. He led the league in rushing yards in 1938 and 1940, and he was one of the first "big money" NFL players, making $15,000 per year (). White used the money he earned playing football to pay his law school tuition.


title: Byron White

text: His NFL career was cut short when he entered the U.S. Navy in 1942; after the war, he elected to finish law school rather than return to football. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.


title: Byron White

text: During World War II, White served as an intelligence officer in the Navy, and was stationed in the Pacific Theatre. He originally wanted to join the Marines, but was kept out due to being colorblind. He wrote the intelligence report on the sinking of future President John F. Kennedy's "PT-109". For his service, White was awarded two Bronze Star medals, and was honorably discharged as a lieutenant commander in 1945.


title: Byron White

text: After his military service, White returned to Yale Law School, graduating in 1946 ranked first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws degree, "magna cum laude", and membership in the Order of the Coif. White served as a law clerk to Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1946 to 1947, then returned to Colorado and entered private practice in Denver with the law firm now known as Davis Graham & Stubbs. This was a time in which the Denver economy flourished, and White rendered legal service to the business community. White was for the most part a transactional attorney; he drafted contracts and advised insolvent companies, and he argued the occasional case in court.


title: Byron White

text: During the 1960 presidential election, White put his football celebrity to use as chair of John F. Kennedy's campaign in Colorado. White had first met the candidate when White was a Rhodes scholar and Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy, was Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. During the Kennedy administration, White served as United States Deputy Attorney General, the number two man in the Justice Department, under Robert F. Kennedy. He took the lead in protecting the Freedom Riders in 1961, negotiating with Alabama Governor John Malcolm Patterson.


title: Byron White

text: On April 3, 1962, President Kennedy nominated White as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to succeed Charles Evans Whittaker. Regarding his longtime friend, the president said at the time: "He has excelled at everything. And I know that he will excel on the highest court in the land." White was confirmed on April 11, 1962, by a voice vote. He took the judicial oath of office on April 16, 1962, and served until June 28, 1993. His Supreme Court tenure was the fourth-longest of the 20th century.


title: Byron White

text: Upon the request of Vice President-Elect Al Gore, White administered the oath of office on January 20, 1993, to Gore. It was the only time White administered an oath of office to a vice president. During his service on the high court, White wrote 994 opinions. He was fierce in questioning attorneys in court, and his votes and opinions on the bench reflect an ideology that has been notoriously difficult for popular journalists and legal scholars alike to pin down. He was seen as a disappointment by some Kennedy supporters who wished he had joined the more liberal wing of the court in its opinions on "Miranda v. Arizona" and "Roe v. Wade".


title: Byron White

text: White often took a narrow, fact-specific view of cases before the Court and generally refused to make broad pronouncements on constitutional doctrine or adhere to a specific judicial philosophy, preferring what he viewed as a practical approach to the law. In the tradition of the New Deal, White frequently supported a broad view and expansion of governmental powers. He consistently voted against creating constitutional restrictions on the police, dissenting in the landmark 1966 case "Miranda v. Arizona". In that dissent, he said that aggressive police practices enhance the individual rights of law-abiding citizens. His jurisprudence has sometimes been praised for adhering to the doctrine of judicial restraint.


title: Byron White

text: Frequently a critic of the doctrine of "substantive due process", which involves the judiciary reading substantive content into the term "liberty" in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, White's first published opinion as a Supreme Court Justice was a joint dissent with Justice Clark in "Robinson v. California" (1962), foreshadowing his career-long distaste for the doctrine. In "Robinson", he criticized the remainder of the Court's unprecedented expansion of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" to strike down a California law providing for civil commitment of drug addicts. He argued that the Court was "imposing its own philosophical predilections" on the state in this exercise of judicial power, although its historic "allergy to substantive due process" would never permit it to strike down a state's economic regulatory law in such a manner.


title: Byron White

text: In the same vein, he dissented in the controversial 1973 case "Roe v. Wade". White voted to strike down a state ban on contraceptives in the 1965 case of "Griswold v. Connecticut", although he did not join the majority opinion, which famously asserted a "right of privacy" on the basis of the "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights. White and Justice William Rehnquist were the only dissenters from the Court's decision in "Roe", though White's dissent used stronger language, suggesting that "Roe" was "an exercise in raw judicial power" and criticizing the decision for "interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life." White, who usually adhered firmly to the doctrine of "stare decisis", remained a critic of "Roe" throughout his term on the bench and frequently voted to uphold laws restricting abortion, including in "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" in 1992.


title: Byron White

text: White explained his general views on the validity of substantive due process at length in his dissent in "Moore v. City of East Cleveland" (1977):


title: Byron White

text: The Judiciary, including this Court, is the most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or even the design of the Constitution. Realizing that the present construction of the Due Process Clause represents a major judicial gloss on its terms, as well as on the anticipation of the Framers, and that much of the underpinning for the broad, substantive application of the Clause disappeared in the conflict between the Executive and the Judiciary in the 1930s and 1940s, the Court should be extremely reluctant to breathe still further substantive content into the Due Process clause so as to strike down legislation adopted by a State or city to promote its welfare. Whenever the Judiciary does so, it unavoidably pre-empts for itself another part of the governance of the country without express constitutional authority.


title: Byron White

text: White parted company with Rehnquist in strongly supporting the Supreme Court decisions striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of sex, agreeing with Justice William J. Brennan in 1973's "Frontiero v. Richardson" that such laws should be subject to strict scrutiny. Only three justices joined Brennan's plurality opinion in "Frontiero"; later gender discrimination cases would be subjected to intermediate scrutiny (see "Craig v. Boren"). In "Rostker v. Goldberg", White joined Brennan and Marshall in dissent arguing that male-only Selective Service registration was unconstitutional.


title: Byron White

text: White wrote the majority opinion in "Bowers v. Hardwick" (1986), which upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law against a substantive due process attack:


title: Byron White

text: The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution... There should be, therefore, great resistance to ... redefining the category of rights deemed to be fundamental. Otherwise, the Judiciary necessarily takes to itself further authority to govern the country without express constitutional authority.


title: Byron White

text: White's opinion in "Bowers" typified his fact-specific, deferential style, treating the issue in that case as presenting only the question of whether homosexuals had a fundamental right to privacy, even though the statute in "Bowers" potentially applied to heterosexual sodomy. Georgia, however, conceded during oral argument that the law would be inapplicable to married couples under the precedent set forth in "Griswold v. Connecticut". A year after White's death, "Bowers" was overruled in "Lawrence v. Texas" (2003).


title: Byron White

text: White took a middle course on the issue of the death penalty: he was one of five justices who voted in "Furman v. Georgia" (1972) to strike down several state capital punishment statutes, voicing concern over the arbitrary way in which the death penalty was administered. The Furman decision ended capital punishment in the U.S. until the court's ruling in "Gregg v. Georgia" (1976). In that case, White voted to uphold Georgia's new capital punishment law.


title: Byron White

text: White accepted the position that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution required that all punishments be "proportional" to the crime; thus, in "Coker v. Georgia" (1977), he wrote the opinion that invalidated the death penalty for rape of a 16-year-old married girl. His first reported Supreme Court decision was a dissent in "Robinson v. California" (1962), in which he criticized the Court for extending the reach of the Eighth Amendment. In "Robinson" the Court for the first time expanded the constitutional prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments" from examining the nature of the punishment imposed and whether it was an uncommon punishment − as, for example, in the cases of flogging, branding, banishment, or electrocution − to deciding whether any punishment at all was appropriate for the defendant's conduct. White said: "If this case involved economic regulation, the present Court's allergy to substantive due process would surely save the statute and prevent the Court from imposing its own philosophical predilections upon state legislatures or Congress." Consistent with his view in "Robinson", White thought that imposing the death penalty on minors was constitutional, and he was one of the three dissenters in "Thompson v. Oklahoma" (1988), a decision that declared that the death penalty as applied to offenders below 16 years of age was unconstitutional as a cruel and unusual punishment.


title: Byron White

text: Along with Justice William Rehnquist, White dissented in "Roe v. Wade" (the dissenting decision was in the companion case, "Doe v. Bolton"), castigating the majority for holding that the U.S. Constitution "values the convenience, whim or caprice of the putative mother more than the life or potential life of the fetus."


title: Byron White

text: White consistently supported the Court's post-"Brown v. Board of Education" attempts to fully desegregate public schools, even through the controversial line of forced busing cases. He voted to uphold affirmative action remedies to racial inequality in an education setting in the famous "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" case of 1978. Though White voted to uphold federal affirmative action programs in cases such as "Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC", 497 U.S. 547 (1990) (later overruled by "Adarand Constructors v. Peña", 515 U.S. 200 (1995)), he voted to strike down an affirmative action plan regarding state contracts in "Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co." (1989).


title: Byron White

text: White dissented in "Runyon v. McCrary" (1976), which held that federal law prohibited private schools from discriminating on the basis of race. He argued that the legislative history of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (popularly known as the "Ku Klux Klan Act") indicated that the Act was not designed to prohibit private racial discrimination but only state-sponsored racial discrimination (as had been held in the "Civil Rights Cases" of 1883). White was concerned about the potential far-reaching impact of holding private racial discrimination illegal, which if taken to its logical conclusion might ban many varied forms of voluntary self-segregation, including social and advocacy groups that limited their membership to blacks: "Whether such conduct should be condoned or not, whites and blacks will undoubtedly choose to form a variety of associational relationships pursuant to contracts which exclude members of the other race. Social clubs, black and white, and associations designed to further the interests of blacks or whites are but two examples". "Runyon" was essentially overruled by 1989's "Patterson v. McLean Credit Union", which itself was superseded by the Civil Rights Act of 1991.


title: Byron White

text: White said he was most comfortable on Rehnquist's court. He once said of Earl Warren, "I wasn't exactly in his circle." On the Burger Court, the Chief Justice often assigned important criminal procedure and individual rights opinions to White because of his frequently conservative views on these questions.


title: Byron White

text: White frequently urged the Supreme Court to consider cases when federal appeals courts were in conflict on issues of federal law, believing that resolving such was a primary role of the Supreme Court. Thus, White voted to grant certiorari more often than many of his colleagues; he also wrote numerous opinions dissenting from denials of certiorari. After White (along with fellow Justice Harry Blackmun, who also often voted for liberal grants of certiorari) retired, the number of cases heard each session of the Court declined steeply.


title: Byron White

text: White disliked the politics of Supreme Court appointments, but had great faith in representative democracy, responding to complaints about politicians and mediocrity in government with exhortations to "get more involved and help fix it." He retired in 1993, during Bill Clinton's presidency, saying that "someone else should be permitted to have a like experience." When he retired, White was the last veteran of the Warren Court to remain on the bench. Clinton nominated (and the Senate approved) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and a former Columbia University law professor, to succeed him.


title: Byron White

text: After retiring from the Supreme Court, White occasionally sat with lower federal courts. He maintained chambers in the federal courthouse in Denver until shortly before his death. He also served for the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals.


title: Byron White

text: White died of pneumonia on April 15, 2002, at the age of 84. He was the last living Justice to have served on the Warren Court, and died the day before the fortieth anniversary of his swearing in as a Justice. From his death until the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, there were no living former justices.


title: Byron White

text: Then-Chief Justice Rehnquist said White "came as close as anyone I have known to meriting Matthew Arnold's description of Sophocles: 'He saw life steadily and he saw it whole.' All of us who served with him will miss him."


title: Byron White

text: White first met his wife Marion Stearns (1921–2009), the daughter of the president of the University of Colorado, when she was in high school and he was a college football player. During World War II, Marion served in the WAVES while her future husband was a Navy intelligence officer. They married in 1946 and had two children: a son named Charles Byron (Barney) and a daughter named Nancy.


title: Byron White

text: His older brother Clayton Samuel "Sam" White (1912–2004) was also a high school valedictorian and Rhodes Scholar. He later became a physician and medical researcher, particularly on the effects of atomic bomb blasts.


title: Byron White

text: The NFL Players Association gives the Byron "Whizzer" White NFL Man of the Year Award to one player each year for his charity work. Michael McCrary, who was involved in "Runyon v. McCrary", grew up to be a professional football player and won the award in 2000.


title: Byron White

text: White was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 by President George W. Bush.


title: Byron White

text: White was inducted into the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Hall of Fame on July 14, 2007, in addition to being a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and the University of Colorado's Athletic Hall of Fame, where he is enshrined as "The Greatest Buff Ever".


title: Byron White

text: One of White's former law clerks, Dennis J. Hutchinson, wrote an unofficial biography of him called "The Man Who Once was Whizzer White".


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (; 20 February 1844 – 5 September 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1877 he provided the current definition of entropy, formula_1, where Ω is the number of microstates whose energy equals the system's energy, interpreted as a measure of statistical disorder of a system. Max Planck named the constant the Boltzmann constant.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Statistical mechanics is one of the pillars of modern physics. It describes how macroscopic observations (such as temperature and pressure) are related to microscopic parameters that fluctuate around an average. It connects thermodynamic quantities (such as heat capacity) to microscopic behavior, whereas, in classical thermodynamics, the only available option would be to measure and tabulate such quantities for various materials.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann was born in Erdberg, a suburb of Vienna. His father, Ludwig Georg Boltzmann, was a revenue official. His grandfather, who had moved to Vienna from Berlin, was a clock manufacturer, and Boltzmann's mother, Katharina Pauernfeind, was originally from Salzburg. He received his primary education at the home of his parents. Boltzmann attended high school in Linz, Upper Austria. When Boltzmann was 15, his father died.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Starting in 1863, Boltzmann studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. He received his doctorate in 1866 and his venia legendi in 1869. Boltzmann worked closely with Josef Stefan, director of the institute of physics. It was Stefan who introduced Boltzmann to Maxwell's work.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In 1869 at age 25, thanks to a letter of recommendation written by Josef Stefan, Boltzmann was appointed full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Graz in the province of Styria. In 1869 he spent several months in Heidelberg working with Robert Bunsen and Leo Königsberger and in 1871 with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin. In 1873 Boltzmann joined the University of Vienna as Professor of Mathematics and there he stayed until 1876.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In 1872, long before women were admitted to Austrian universities, he met Henriette von Aigentler, an aspiring teacher of mathematics and physics in Graz. She was refused permission to audit lectures unofficially. Boltzmann supported her decision to appeal, which was successful. On 17 July 1876 Ludwig Boltzmann married Henriette; they had three daughters: Henriette (1880), Ida (1884) and Else (1891); and a son, Arthur Ludwig (1881). Boltzmann went back to Graz to take up the chair of Experimental Physics. Among his students in Graz were Svante Arrhenius and Walther Nernst. He spent 14 happy years in Graz and it was there that he developed his statistical concept of nature.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann was appointed to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich in Bavaria, Germany in 1890.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In 1894, Boltzmann succeeded his teacher Joseph Stefan as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann spent a great deal of effort in his final years defending his theories. He did not get along with some of his colleagues in Vienna, particularly Ernst Mach, who became a professor of philosophy and history of sciences in 1895. That same year Georg Helm and Wilhelm Ostwald presented their position on energetics at a meeting in Lübeck. They saw energy, and not matter, as the chief component of the universe. Boltzmann's position carried the day among other physicists who supported his atomic theories in the debate. In 1900, Boltzmann went to the University of Leipzig, on the invitation of Wilhelm Ostwald. Ostwald offered Boltzmann the professorial chair in physics, which became vacant when Gustav Heinrich Wiedemann died. After Mach retired due to bad health, Boltzmann returned to Vienna in 1902. In 1903, Boltzmann, together with Gustav von Escherich and Emil Müller, founded the Austrian Mathematical Society. His students included Karl Přibram, Paul Ehrenfest and Lise Meitner.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In Vienna, Boltzmann taught physics and also lectured on philosophy. Boltzmann's lectures on natural philosophy were very popular and received considerable attention. His first lecture was an enormous success. Even though the largest lecture hall had been chosen for it, the people stood all the way down the staircase. Because of the great successes of Boltzmann's philosophical lectures, the Emperor invited him for a reception at the Palace.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In 1906, Boltzmann's deteriorating mental condition forced him to resign his position, and his symptoms indicate he experienced what would today be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Four months later he died by suicide on 5 September 1906, by hanging himself while on vacation with his wife and daughter in Duino, near Trieste (then Austria).


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: He is buried in the Viennese Zentralfriedhof. His tombstone bears the inscription of Boltzmann's entropy formula: formula_2.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases seemed to presuppose the reality of atoms and molecules, but almost all German philosophers and many scientists like Ernst Mach and the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald disbelieved their existence.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann's most important scientific contributions were in kinetic theory, including for motivating the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution as a description of molecular speeds in a gas. Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics and the Boltzmann distribution remain central in the foundations of classical statistical mechanics. They are also applicable to other phenomena that do not require quantum statistics and provide insight into the meaning of temperature.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Most chemists, since the discoveries of John Dalton in 1808, and James Clerk Maxwell in Scotland and Josiah Willard Gibbs in the United States, shared Boltzmann's belief in atoms and molecules, but much of the physics establishment did not share this belief until decades later. Boltzmann had a long-running dispute with the editor of the preeminent German physics journal of his day, who refused to let Boltzmann refer to atoms and molecules as anything other than convenient theoretical constructs. Only a couple of years after Boltzmann's death, Perrin's studies of colloidal suspensions (1908–1909), based on Einstein's theoretical studies of 1905, confirmed the values of the Avogadro constant and the Boltzmann constant, convincing the world that the tiny particles really exist.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: To quote Planck, "The logarithmic connection between entropy and probability was first stated by L. Boltzmann in his kinetic theory of gases". This famous formula for entropy "S" is


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: where "k" is the Boltzmann constant, and ln is the natural logarithm. "W" is "Wahrscheinlichkeit", a German word meaning the probability of occurrence of a macrostate or, more precisely, the number of possible microstates corresponding to the macroscopic state of a system — the number of (unobservable) "ways" in the (observable) thermodynamic state of a system that can be realized by assigning different positions and momenta to the various molecules. Boltzmann's paradigm was an ideal gas of "N" "identical" particles, of which "N" are in the "i"th microscopic condition (range) of position and momentum. "W" can be counted using the formula for permutations


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: where "i" ranges over all possible molecular conditions, and where formula_5 denotes factorial. The "correction" in the denominator account for indistinguishable particles in the same condition.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann could also be considered one of the forerunners of quantum mechanics due to his suggestion in 1877 that the energy levels of a physical system could be discrete.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: where "ƒ" represents the distribution function of single-particle position and momentum at a given time (see the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution), "F" is a force, "m" is the mass of a particle, "t" is the time and "v" is an average velocity of particles.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: This equation describes the temporal and spatial variation of the probability distribution for the position and momentum of a density distribution of a cloud of points in single-particle phase space. (See Hamiltonian mechanics.) The first term on the left-hand side represents the explicit time variation of the distribution function, while the second term gives the spatial variation, and the third term describes the effect of any force acting on the particles. The right-hand side of the equation represents the effect of collisions.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In principle, the above equation completely describes the dynamics of an ensemble of gas particles, given appropriate boundary conditions. This first-order differential equation has a deceptively simple appearance, since "f" can represent an arbitrary single-particle distribution function. Also, the force acting on the particles depends directly on the velocity distribution function "f". The Boltzmann equation is notoriously difficult to integrate. David Hilbert spent years trying to solve it without any real success.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: The form of the collision term assumed by Boltzmann was approximate. However, for an ideal gas the standard Chapman–Enskog solution of the Boltzmann equation is highly accurate. It is expected to lead to incorrect results for an ideal gas only under shock wave conditions.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann tried for many years to "prove" the second law of thermodynamics using his gas-dynamical equation — his famous H-theorem. However the key assumption he made in formulating the collision term was "molecular chaos", an assumption which breaks time-reversal symmetry as is necessary for "anything" which could imply the second law. It was from the probabilistic assumption alone that Boltzmann's apparent success emanated, so his long dispute with Loschmidt and others over Loschmidt's paradox ultimately ended in his failure.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Finally, in the 1970s E.G.D. Cohen and J. R. Dorfman proved that a systematic (power series) extension of the Boltzmann equation to high densities is mathematically impossible. Consequently, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics for dense gases and liquids focuses on the Green–Kubo relations, the fluctuation theorem, and other approaches instead.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: The idea that the second law of thermodynamics or "entropy law" is a law of disorder (or that dynamically ordered states are "infinitely improbable") is due to Boltzmann's view of the second law of thermodynamics.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In particular, it was Boltzmann's attempt to reduce it to a stochastic collision function, or law of probability following from the random collisions of mechanical particles. Following Maxwell, Boltzmann modeled gas molecules as colliding billiard balls in a box, noting that with each collision nonequilibrium velocity distributions (groups of molecules moving at the same speed and in the same direction) would become increasingly disordered leading to a final state of macroscopic uniformity and maximum microscopic disorder or the state of maximum entropy (where the macroscopic uniformity corresponds to the obliteration of all field potentials or gradients). The second law, he argued, was thus simply the result of the fact that in a world of mechanically colliding particles disordered states are the most probable. Because there are so many more possible disordered states than ordered ones, a system will almost always be found either in the state of maximum disorder – the macrostate with the greatest number of accessible microstates such as a gas in a box at equilibrium – or moving towards it. A dynamically ordered state, one with molecules moving "at the same speed and in the same direction", Boltzmann concluded, is thus "the most improbable case conceivable...an infinitely improbable configuration of energy."


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: Boltzmann accomplished the feat of showing that the second law of thermodynamics is only a statistical fact. The gradual disordering of energy is analogous to the disordering of an initially ordered pack of cards under repeated shuffling, and just as the cards will finally return to their original order if shuffled a gigantic number of times, so the entire universe must some-day regain, by pure chance, the state from which it first set out. (This optimistic coda to the idea of the dying universe becomes somewhat muted when one attempts to estimate the timeline which will probably elapse before it spontaneously occurs.) The tendency for entropy increase seems to cause difficulty to beginners in thermodynamics, but is easy to understand from the standpoint of the theory of probability. Consider two ordinary dice, with both sixes face up. After the dice are shaken, the chance of finding these two sixes face up is small (1 in 36); thus one can say that the random motion (the agitation) of the dice, like the chaotic collisions of molecules because of thermal energy, causes the less probable state to change to one that is more probable. With millions of dice, like the millions of atoms involved in thermodynamic calculations, the probability of their all being sixes becomes so vanishingly small that the system "must" move to one of the more probable states.


title: Ludwig Boltzmann

text: In 1885 he became a member of the Imperial Austrian Academy of Sciences and in 1887 he became the President of the University of Graz. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1888 and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1899. Numerous things are named in his honour.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The "North Carolina" class were a pair of fast battleships, and , built for the United States Navy in the late 1930s and early 1940s.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: In planning a new battleship class in the 1930s, the US Navy was heavily constrained by international treaty limitations, which included a requirement that all new capital ships have a standard displacement of under . This restriction meant that the navy could not construct a ship with the firepower, armor, and speed that they desired, and the balancing uncertainty that resulted meant that the navy considered fifty widely varying designs.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Eventually, the General Board of the United States Navy declared its preference for a battleship with a speed of , faster than any in US service, with a main battery of nine /50 caliber Mark B guns. The board believed that these ships would be balanced enough to effectively take on a multitude of roles. However, the acting Secretary of the Navy authorized a modified version of a different design, which in its original form had been rejected by the General Board. This called for a ship with twelve 14-inch guns in quadruple turrets and protection against guns of the same caliber. In a major departure from traditional American design practices, this design prioritized firepower at the cost of speed and protection. After construction had begun, the United States invoked a so-called "escalator clause" in the international treaty to increase the class' main armament to nine /45 caliber Mark 6 guns.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Both "North Carolina" and "Washington" saw extensive service during the Second World War in a variety of roles, primarily in the Pacific Theater where they escorted fast carrier task forces, such as during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and conducted shore bombardments. "Washington" also participated in a surface engagement, the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, where its radar-directed main batteries fatally damaged the Japanese battleship . Both battleships were damaged during the war, with "North Carolina" taking a torpedo hit in 1942 and "Washington" colliding with in 1944. After the end of the war, both ships remained in commission for a brief time before being laid up in reserve. In the early 1960s, "North Carolina" was sold to the state of North Carolina as a museum ship, and "Washington" was broken up for scrap.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: After the end of the First World War, several navies continued and expanded naval construction programs that they had started during the conflict. The United States' 1916 program called for six s and five battleships; in December 1918, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson called for building an additional ten battleships and six battlecruisers. The 1919–1920 General Board proposals planned for slightly smaller, but still significant, acquisitions beyond the 1916 plan: two battleships and a battlecruiser for the fiscal year 1921, and three battleships, a battlecruiser, four aircraft carriers and thirty destroyers between the fiscal years 1922 and 1924. The United Kingdom was in the final stages of ordering eight capital ships (the G3 battlecruisers, with the first's keel laying in 1921, and N3-class battleships, to be laid down beginning in 1922). Imperial Japan was, by 1920, attempting to build up to an 8-8 standard of eight battleships and eight battlecruisers or cruisers with the , , , and classes. Two ships from these designs were to be laid down per year until 1928.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: With the staggering costs associated with such programs, the United States' Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited delegations from the major maritime powers—France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—to come together in Washington, D.C. to discuss, and hopefully end, the naval arms race. The subsequent Washington Naval Conference resulted in the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. Along with many other provisions, it limited all future battleships to a standard displacement of and a maximum gun caliber of 16 inches. It also decreed that the five countries could not construct another capital ship for ten years and could not replace any ship that survived the treaty until it was at least twenty years old. The 1936 Second London Naval Treaty kept many of the Washington treaty's requirements but restricted gun size on new warships to 14 inches.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The treaties heavily influenced the design of the "North Carolina" class, as can be attested to in the long quest to find a ship that incorporated everything the US Navy considered necessary while remaining under 35,000 long tons.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The General Board began preparations for a new class of battleships in May–July 1935, and three design studies were submitted to them. "A" would be armed with nine guns in triple turrets, all forward of the bridge; capable of 30 knots; and armored against 14-inch shells. "B" and "C" would both be over , able to reach , and armored against 14-inch shells. The major difference between the two was the planned main battery, as "B" had twelve 14-inch guns in triple turrets, while "C" had eight 16-inch/45-caliber guns in dual turrets. "A" was the only one to remain within the 35,000-ton displacement limit set in the Washington Naval Treaty and reaffirmed in the Second London Naval Treaty. When the Bureau of Ordnance introduced a "super-heavy" 16-inch shell, the ships were redesigned in an attempt to provide protection against it, but this introduced severe weight problems; two of the designs were nearly over the treaty limit.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Although these original three studies were all "fast" battleships, the General Board was not committed to the higher maximum speeds. It posed questions to the Naval War College, asking for their opinion as to whether the new class should be a "conventional" ship with an eight-nine, 16-inch main battery, or rather one akin to "A", "B" or "C".


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Five more design studies were produced in late September 1935, which had characteristics of 23–30.5 knots, eight or nine 14- or 16-inch guns, and a standard displacement between . Designs "D" and "E" were attempts at fast battleships with 16-inch guns and protections against the same, but their displacement was greater than the Washington Naval Treaty allowed. Design "F" was a radical attempt at a hybrid battleship-carrier, with three catapults mounted fore and eight 14-inch guns aft. It was reportedly favored by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but as aircraft launched from catapults were necessarily inferior to most carrier- or land-based aircraft because of the floats used to land, nothing came of the design. Designs "G" and "H" were slower 23-knot ships with nine 14-inch guns; in particular, "H" was thought to be a very well balanced design by the Preliminary Design section of the Bureau of Construction and Repair. However, the General Board finally decided to use faster ships, which "G" and "H" were not.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: These studies demonstrated the difficulty the designers faced with a displacement of 35,000 tons. They could choose a faster ship, able to steam at 30 knots, but that would force them to mount a lighter armament and armor than contemporary foreign battleships. Alternatively, they could choose a lower maximum speed and mount heavier guns, but fitting in adequate protection against newer 16-inch guns would be extremely difficult. The Preliminary Design section drew up five more studies in October, based upon "A" with additional armor or a scaled-down "B"; all used 14-inch guns and called for at least 30 knots. Two called for four turrets, but they would be too heavy and mount less armor. Another, "K," would have a belt and deck, giving it a immune zone against the United States' super-heavy 14-inch shell. While "K" was liked by the naval constructors, its designed standard displacement of 35,000 tons left little room for error, modifications, or improvements . The final two designs, "L" and "M," would use quadruple turrets to save weight (similar to the French ) while still mounting 12 guns.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Many officers in the United States Navy supported the construction of three or four fast battleships for carrier escorts and to counter Japan's . These included the acting Secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William Standley, the president of the Naval War College Admiral William S. Pye, a small majority (9–7) of senior officers at sea, and five of six line officers engaged in strategic planning as part of the War Plans Division, although at least one officer believed that an aerial attack would also be capable of sinking the "Kongō"s. With the above recommendations, the General Board selected "K" to undergo further development.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: At least 35 different final designs were proposed. All numbered with Roman numerals ("I" through "XVI-D"), the first five were completed on 15 November 1935. They were the first to employ so-called "paper" weight reductions: not counting certain weights towards the ship's 35,000 long ton treaty limit that were not specifically part of the definition of standard displacement. In this case, even though there was designed storage room for 100 shells per main battery gun and an extra 100 rounds, the weight of the rounds did not figure toward the treaty-mandated limit.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: These final designs varied greatly in everything but their standard displacements and speeds. Just one was over the treaty displacement limit; every other design called for 35,000 long tons. Only five planned for a top speed of under ; of those, only one was lower than : "VII", with . "VII" returned to a lower speed to obtain more firepower (twelve 14-inch guns in triple turrets) and protection; as such, the design called for only and a length of only . Most other plans called for or , although a few had lengths between and . Several different gun mountings were examined, including eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve 14-inch guns; eight 14-inch guns in two quadruple turrets, and even one design with two quadruple 16-inch guns.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: One specific design, "XVI," was a , ship with twelve 14-inch guns, a belt, and a deck thick. Produced on 20 August 1936, the Bureau of Ordnance found many problems in it. For example, model tests showed that at high speeds, waves generated by the hull would leave certain lower parts of the ship uncovered by water or adequate armor, including around the explosive magazines, and the Bureau believed that hits around this part of the hull were easily possibly when fighting at ranges between . Other problems included the design's defense against aircraft-dropped bombs, as the Bureau thought the formula used to calculate its effectiveness was not realistic, and the tapering of a fore bulkhead below the waterline could worsen underwater shell hits because the mostly unarmored bow could easily be penetrated. The proposed solutions for these issues were all impractical: added patches of armor around the magazines could neutralize the effectiveness of the ship's torpedo-defense system, and deepening the belt near the bow and stern would put the ships over the 35,000 long ton limit. The General Board detested this design, saying it was "not ... a true battleship" due to its speed and armor problems.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: To address these problems, a final set of designs was presented by the Preliminary Design section in October 1936. Designated "XVI-B" through "XVI-D," they were all modifications of the "XVI" plan. These added an extra of length to "XVI" for greater speed, but the resulting weight increase meant that only eleven 14-inch guns could be mounted with a thin belt. Another gun could be traded for a belt, and yet another could be swapped for more speed and an extra tenth of an inch of belt armor; this became design "XVI-C". The General Board liked "XVI-C" very much, seeing in it a ship that had enough protection to fight—and survive—in a battle line formed with the US' older battleships while also having enough speed to operate in a detached wing with aircraft carrier or cruiser commerce raiding groups.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: However, one member of the Board, Admiral Joseph Reeves—one of the principal developers of the United States' aircraft carrier strategy—disliked "XVI-C" because he believed that it was not fast enough to work with the fast carriers, and it was not powerful enough to justify its cost. Instead, he advocated a development of the previously rejected "XVI", adding additional underwater protection and patches of armor within the ship to make the magazines immune to above- and below-water shell hits from and beyond. The immune zone's outer limit was increased from to . After further revisions, Reeves went to Standley, the Chief of Naval Operations, who approved "XVI" in its newly modified form over the hopes of the General Board, who still thought that "XVI-C" should be built. Standley's only addition to the characteristics was to be able to switch from quadruple 14-inch to triple turrets if the "escalator clause" in the Second London Naval Treaty was invoked.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: With these parameters now set, "XVI" would become the basis of the "North Carolina" class' as-built design despite additional back and forth over the design's final particulars. These included an increase in armor; something allowed by the finding of more on-paper weight savings; the armor's slope was increased from 10° to 13°, and eventually settled at 15°; a months-long debate on the propulsion machinery's layout was finally concluded, and other minor changes.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Although the Second London Naval Treaty stipulated that warship guns could be no larger than 14 inches, a so-called "escalator clause" was included at the urging of American negotiators in case any country that had signed the Washington Naval Treaty refused to adhere to this new limit. The provision allowed signatory countries of the Second London Treaty—France, the United Kingdom and the United States—to raise the limit from 14 to 16 inches if Japan or Italy still refused to sign after 1 April 1937. When figuring potential configurations for the "North Carolina"s, designers focused most of their planning on 14-inch weaponry; Standley's requirement meant that a switch from 14- to 16-inch, even after the ships' keels had been laid, was possible. Japan formally rejected the 14-inch limit on 27 March 1937, meaning that the "escalator clause" "could" be invoked. There were hurdles that still needed to be overcome, though: Roosevelt was under heavy political pressure and, as a result, was reluctant to allow the 16-inch gun.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Admiral Reeves also came out strongly in favor of the larger weapon. In a two-page letter to Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson and indirectly to Roosevelt, Reeves argued that the 16-inch gun's significantly greater armor penetration was of paramount importance, drawing examples from the First World War's Battle of Jutland, where some battleships were able to survive ten or twenty hits from large guns, but other battlecruisers were blown up in three to seven hits because the shells were able to cut through the armor protecting magazines and turrets. Reeves also argued that the larger gun would favor the "indirect method" of shooting then being developed, where airplanes would be used to relay targeting information to allied battleships so that they could bombard targets that were out of their sight or over the horizon, because new battleships being built by foreign powers would have more armor. Reeves believed that if the 14-inch gun was adopted, it would not be able to penetrate this larger amount of protection, whereas the 16-inch would be able to break through.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: In a final vain attempt, Roosevelt's Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent a telegram on 4 June to the Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew instructing him that the United States would still accept a cap of 14-inch guns if he could get Japan to as well. The Japanese replied that they could not accept this unless the number of battleships was also limited; they wanted the United States and the United Kingdom to agree to having an equal number of battleships with Japan, but this was a condition that the two countries refused to accept. On 24 June, the two "North Carolina"s were ordered with the 14-inch weapons, but on 10 July, Roosevelt directed that they be armed with triple 16-inch instead.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The "North Carolina" was long at the waterline and long overall. The maximum beam was while waterline beam was due to the inclination of the armor belt. In 1942, the standard displacement was while full load displacement was , while maximum draft was . At design combat displacement of , the mean draft was and (GM) metacentric height was . As designed, the crew complement was 1,880 with 108 officers and 1,772 enlisted. By 1945, the considerable increase in anti-aircraft armament and their crew accommodations had increased full load displacement to , while crew complement increased to 2,339 with 144 officers and 2,195 enlisted. After the end of World War II, the crew complement was reduced to 1,774.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The "North Carolina" class hull feature a bulbous bow and had an unusual stern design for the time by placing the two inboard propulsion shafts in skegs. This was theorized to improve flow conditions to the propellers. Initial model basin testing for various stern configurations suggested that the skeg arrangement could reduce resistance, although later testing during the design process of the battleship would indicate an increase in drag. The skegs improved the structural strength of the stern by acting as girders and also provided structural continuity for the torpedo bulkheads. However, the skegs also contributed to severe vibration problems with the class that required extensive testing and modifications to mitigate. The problem was particularly acute near the aft main battery director, which required additional reinforcing braces due to the vibrations. Nevertheless, skegs would be improved and incorporated in the designs of all subsequent American battleships, with vibration problems largely eliminated on the "Iowa" class battleships.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: "North Carolina" and "Washington" were principally armed with nine /45 caliber (cal) Mark 6 guns and twenty /38 cal Mark 12 guns. Their lighter armament consisted of varying numbers of /75 caliber, .50 caliber machine guns, Bofors 40 mm and Oerlikon 20 mm.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Mounted on both the "North Carolina" class and the follow-up , the nine 16 in/45 were improved versions of the guns mounted on the s, hence the designation of "Mark 6". A major alteration from the older guns was the Mark 6's ability to fire a new armor-piercing (AP) shell developed by the Bureau of Ordnance. At full charge with a brand-new gun, the heavy shell would be expelled at a muzzle velocity of . At a reduced charge, the same shell would be fired at . Barrel life—the approximate number of rounds a gun could fire before needing to be relined or replaced—was 395 shells when using AP, although if only practice shells were used this figure was significantly higher: 2,860. Turning at 4 degrees a second, each turret could train to 150 degrees on either side of the ship.<ref name="16/45">DiGiulian, "16"/45 (40.6 cm) Mark 6"</ref> The guns could be elevated to a maximum inclination of 45 degrees; turrets one and three could depress to −2 degrees, but due to its superfiring position, the guns on turret two could only depress to 0 degrees.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Each gun was long overall; its bore and rifling length were and , respectively. Maximum range with the heavy AP shell was obtained at an inclination of 45 degrees: . At the same elevation a lighter high capacity (HC) shell would travel . The guns weighed not including the breech; the turrets weighed .


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: When firing the same shell, the 16-inch/45 Mark 6 had a slight advantage over the 16-inch/50 Mark 7 when hitting deck armor—a shell from a 45 cal gun would be slower, meaning that it would have a steeper trajectory as it descended. At , a shell from a 45 cal would strike a ship at an angle of 47.5 degrees, as opposed to 38 degrees with the 50 cal.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The "North Carolina"s carried ten Mark 28 Mod 0 enclosed base ring mounts, each supporting twin 5-inch/38-caliber Mark 12 guns<ref name="5/38">DiGiulian, 5"/38 (12.7 cm) Mark 12</ref> Originally designed to be mounted on destroyers built in the 1930s, these guns were so successful that they were added to a myriad of American ships during the Second World War, including every major ship type and many smaller warships constructed between 1934 and 1945. They were considered to be "highly reliable, robust and accurate" by the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The 5-inch/38 functioned as a dual purpose gun. However, this did not mean that it possessed inferior anti-air abilities; as established during 1941 gunnery tests conducted on board "North Carolina", the gun possessed the ability to consistently shoot down aircraft flying at , which was twice as far as the effective range of the earlier single purpose 5-inch/25 anti-air gun.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Each 5-inch/38 weighed almost without the breech. The entire mount weighed . It was long overall, had a bore length of , and had a rifling length of . The gun could fire shells at about ; about 4,600 could be fired before the barrel needed to be replaced. Minimum and maximum elevations were −15 and 85 degrees, respectively. The guns' elevation could be raised or lowered at about 15 degrees per second. Loading was possible at any elevation. The mounts closest to the bow and stern could aim from −150 to 150 degrees; the others were restricted to −80 to 80 degrees. They could be turned at about 25 degrees per second.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The remaining weaponry on board the two "North Carolina"s was composed of differing numbers of 1.1"/75 caliber guns, .50 caliber machine guns, Bofors 40 mm and Oerlikon 20 mm cannons. Although the ships were originally designed to carry only four quadruple 1.1 in and twelve .50 caliber, this was greatly increased and upgraded during the war.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: On both ships, two more quadruple sets of 1.1 in guns were added in place of two searchlights amidships. After it was torpedoed in 1942, "North Carolina" had these removed and ten quadruple sets of 40 mm guns added. Fourteen were present by June 1943, while a fifteenth mount was added on top of the third main turret that November. "Washington" retained its six 1.1 in quads until the middle of 1943, when ten quad 40 mm guns replaced them. By August, it had fifteen. The two ships carried these through to the close of the war.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: The .50 caliber machine guns did not have the range or power needed to combat modern aircraft and were scheduled for replacement by equal numbers of 20 mm guns, but nothing immediately came of the proposal. In fact, both "North Carolina" and "Washington" carried 20 mm and .50 caliber guns for most of 1942. In April, "North Carolina" had, respectively, forty and twelve, while "Washington" had twenty and twelve. Two months later, the number of 20 mm guns remained the same, but twelve .50 caliber guns had been added. By September, "Washington" had twenty more 20 mm guns added, for a total of forty, but five were removed—along with all of the .50 caliber guns—shortly thereafter when two quadruple sets of 1.1 in guns were added. In its refit after being torpedoed, "North Carolina" had an additional six 20 mm guns added and all of its .50 caliber weapons removed. "Washington" had sixty-four 20 mm weapons by April 1943, prior to one single mount being replaced by a quadruple mount, and "North Carolina" had fifty-three by March 1944. In April 1945, "North Carolina" was assigned to have fifty-six 20 mm, while "Washington" was assigned seventy-five. In August 1945, the ships both had eight twin 20 mm mounts; "North Carolina" also carried twenty single, while "Washington" carried one quad and sixty-three single.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: Both "North Carolina" and "Washington", designed prior to radar, were originally fitted with many fire-control and navigational optical range-finders. The former lasted until 1944, when it was replaced by a Mark 27 microwave radar supplemented by a Mark 3 main armament fire control radar. The range-finders were removed in favor of additional 20 mm guns sometime between the end of 1941 and mid-1942. In addition, the ships were commissioned with two Mark 38 directors and were originally fitted with a CXAM air search, two Mark 3s and three Mark 4 secondary armament.


title: North Carolina-class battleship

text: By November 1942, "North Carolina" had an additional Mark 4 and a SG surface search radar added. The normal battleship configuration was present aboard "North Carolina" in April 1944, with SK and SG radars (air and surface search, respectively), a backup SG, and Mark 8s to direct its main battery. All of the Mark 4s remained for the secondary battery, and one of the older Mark 3s was still present, possibly as a backup for the Mark 8s. An SK-2 dish replaced the older SK radar and Mark 12s and 22s superseded the Mark 4s in September of that year. Aside from never receiving an SK-2, "Washington" was the recipient of similar upgrades.