title: Kenneth Clarke

text: Following the 2012 Cabinet reshuffle, Clarke was moved from Justice Secretary to Minister without Portfolio. It was also announced that he would assume the role of roving Trade Envoy with responsibility for promoting British business and trade interests abroad, a position which he enjoyed.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In the 2014 Cabinet reshuffle, after more than 20 years serving as a Minister, it was announced that Clarke had stepped down from government, to return to the backbenches. Clarke was honoured with appointment as a Companion of Honour, upon the Prime Minister's recommendation, in July 2014. His total time as a government minister is the fifth-longest in the modern era after Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour, Rab Butler, and The Duke of Devonshire.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: Clarke was opposed to Brexit during the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom's continued membership of the European Union, and opposed the holding of the referendum in the first place. He was the sole Conservative MP to vote against the triggering of Article 50.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: During the 2016 Conservative Party leadership election Clarke was interviewed by Sky News on 5 July 2016 and made negative comments to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, about the "fiasco" (leadership contest) and about three of the candidates. In a widely circulated video clip, he referred to Theresa May as a "bloody difficult woman", joked that Michael Gove, who was "wild", would "go to war with at least three countries at once" and characterised some of the utterances of Andrea Leadsom as "extremely stupid". Clarke added that Gove "did us all a favour by getting rid of Boris. The idea of Boris as prime minister is ridiculous."


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In February 2017, following the death of Sir Gerald Kaufman, Clarke became Father of the House. He was re-elected as an MP in the 2017 general election.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In December 2017, he voted along with fellow Conservative Dominic Grieve and nine other Conservative MPs against the government, and in favour of guaranteeing Parliament a "meaningful vote" on any Brexit deal Britain agrees with the European Union.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In September 2019, after Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost a number of key votes in the House of Commons, Clarke stated that it would be 'not inconceivable' for him to become Prime Minister leading a government of national unity in order to revoke Article 50 and prevent Brexit. Other politicians who were suggested for such a role at the time included Harriet Harman, his female counterpart as Mother of the House of Commons. Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson supported the proposal, though Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the Opposition, both dismissed the suggestion. As it turned out, a vote of no-confidence was not in fact tabled against Boris Johnson's government and no such government of national unity was formed or took office.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: On 3 September 2019, Clarke joined 20 other rebel Conservative MPs to vote against the Conservative government of Boris Johnson. The rebel MPs voted against a Conservative motion which subsequently failed. Effectively, they helped block Johnson's no-deal Brexit plan from proceeding on 31 October. Subsequently, all 21 were advised that they had lost the Conservative whip and were expelled as Conservative MPs, requiring them to sit as independents. If they decided to run for re-election in a future election, the party would block their selection as Conservative candidates, though Clarke opted not to do so.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: On the edition of 3 September of BBC's "Newsnight", Clarke discussed the situation, saying that he no longer recognised the Conservative Party, referring to it as "the Brexit Party, rebadged". His rationale was "It's been taken over by a rather knockabout sort of character, who's got this bizarre crash-it-through philosophy… a Cabinet which is the most right-wing Cabinet any Conservative Party has ever produced." In an interview on 7 September, Clarke rejected the suggestion that, like other former Conservative MPs, he could join the Liberal Democrats, but noted that, if he were to cast 'a protest vote', he would 'follow the Conservative tradition of voting Lib Dem.'


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In his capacity as Father of the House, Clarke presided over the House of Commons during the 2019 Speakership election. He then retired from the House of Commons at the 2019 general election. Since Dennis Skinner lost his seat in the election, Sir Peter Bottomley became Father of the House.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In early 2020, Clarke was nominated for a peerage by Boris Johnson. On 4 September he was created Baron Clarke of Nottingham, "of West Bridgford in the County of Nottinghamshire". Taking the Conservative whip, he made his maiden speech on 28 September 2020.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: Whilst serving as a backbench MP and as a Shadow Cabinet Minister, Clarke accepted several non-executive directorships:


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: In 1964, Clarke married Gillian Edwards, a Cambridge contemporary. They had a son and a daughter. Edwards died of cancer in July 2015.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: Clarke's enthusiasm for cigars, jazz and motor racing is well known, and he enjoys birdwatching as well as reading political history. He is also popularly recognised for his affection for suede Hush Puppies, a brand of shoe, which became a "trademark" of his during his early ministerial days. His autobiography denies he wore Hush Puppies and says these suede shoes were hand-made by Crockett & Jones.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: Clarke is a sports enthusiast, being a supporter of both local clubs Notts County and Nottingham Forest, who offered him a chair and a former President of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club. He is President of both Radcliffe Olympic and the Radcliffe on Trent Male Voice Choir, and a keen follower of Formula One motorsport. He was involved with tobacco giant British American Tobacco's Formula One team British American Racing (BAR) and has attended Grands Prix in support of the BAR team. BAR was sold to Honda in 2005. He also appeared on the podium of the 2012 British Grand Prix to present the first-place trophy to Mark Webber.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: He attended the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final and jokingly claims to have been influential in persuading the linesman, Tofiq Bahramov, to award a goal to Geoff Hurst when the England striker had seen his shot hit the crossbar of opponents West Germany, leaving doubt as to whether the ball had crossed the line. Clarke's position in the Wembley crowd was right behind the linesman at the time, and he shouted at the official to award a goal.


title: Kenneth Clarke

text: Clarke is a lover of real ale and has been an active member of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). His memoir, "Kind of Blue", was published in October 2016.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. This award is administered by the Nobel Foundation, and awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on proposal of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry which consists of five members elected by the Academy. The award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of Nobel's death.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, of the Netherlands, "for his discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions". From 1901 to 2022, the award has been bestowed on a total of 189 individuals. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten P. Meldal, and Karl Barry Sharpless for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Only eight women have received the prize, including Marie Curie, her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), Ada Yonath (2009), Frances Arnold (2018), Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (2020) and Carolyn R. Bertozzi (2022).


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: Alfred Nobel stipulated in his last will and testament that his money be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine, and literature. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, and signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on 27 November 1895. Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets, 31 million Swedish "kronor" (US$198 million, €176 million in 2016), to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of skepticism surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that it was approved by the Storting (Norwegian Parliament). The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, who formed the Nobel Foundation to take care of Nobel's fortune and organise the prizes.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed: the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on 11 June. The Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundation's newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II. According to Nobel's will, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences were to award the Prize in Chemistry.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The committee and institution serving as the selection board for the prize typically announce the names of the laureates in October. The prize is then awarded at formal ceremonies held annually on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death. "The highlight of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm is when each Nobel Laureate steps forward to receive the prize from the hands of His Majesty the King of Sweden. The Nobel Laureate receives three things: a diploma, a medal and a document confirming the prize amount" ("What the Nobel Laureates Receive"). Later the "Nobel Banquet" is held in Stockholm City Hall.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: A maximum of three laureates and two different works may be selected. The award can be given to a maximum of three recipients per year. It consists of a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash grant.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The Nobel Laureates in chemistry are selected by a committee that consists of five members elected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In its first stage, several thousand people are asked to nominate candidates. These names are scrutinized and discussed by experts until only the laureates remain. This slow and thorough process, is arguably what gives the prize its importance.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: Forms, which amount to a personal and exclusive invitation, are sent to about three thousand selected individuals to invite them to submit nominations. The names of the nominees are never publicly announced, and neither are they told that they have been considered for the Prize. Nomination records are sealed for fifty years. In practice, some nominees do become known. It is also common for publicists to make such a claim – founded or not.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The nominations are screened by committee, and a list is produced of approximately two hundred preliminary candidates. This list is forwarded to selected experts in the field. They remove all but approximately fifteen names. The committee submits a report with recommendations to the appropriate institution.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: While posthumous nominations are not permitted, awards can occur if the individual died in the months between the nomination and the decision of the prize committee.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The award in chemistry requires the significance of achievements being recognized is "tested by time". In practice it means that the lag between the discovery and the award is typically on the order of 20 years and can be much longer. As a downside of this approach, not all scientists live long enough for their work to be recognized. Some important scientific discoveries are never considered for a Prize, as the discoverers may have died by the time the impact of their work is realized.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: A Chemistry Nobel Prize laureate earns a gold medal, a diploma bearing a citation, and a sum of money.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: The Nobel Prize medals, minted by Myntverket in Sweden and the Mint of Norway since 1902, are registered trademarks of the Nobel Foundation. Each medal feature an image of Alfred Nobel in left profile on the obverse (front side of the medal). The Nobel Prize medals for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature have identical obverses, showing the image of Alfred Nobel and the years of his birth and death (1833–1896). Nobel's portrait also appears on the obverse of the Nobel Peace Prize medal and the Medal for the Prize in Economics, but with a slightly different design. The image on the reverse of a medal varies according to the institution awarding the prize. The reverse sides of the Nobel Prize medals for Chemistry and Physics share the same design.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: Nobel laureates receive a diploma directly from the hands of the King of Sweden. Each diploma is uniquely designed by the prize-awarding institutions for the laureate that receives it. The diploma contains a picture and text which states the name of the laureate and normally a citation of why they received the prize.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: At the awards ceremony, the laureate is given a document indicating the award sum. The amount of the cash award may differ from year to year, based on the funding available from the Nobel Foundation. For example, in 2009 the total cash awarded was 10 million SEK (US$1.4 million), but in 2012, the amount was 8 million Swedish Krona, or US$1.1 million. If there are two laureates in a particular category, the award grant is divided equally between the recipients, but if there are three, the awarding committee may opt to divide the grant equally, or award half to one recipient and a quarter to each of the two others.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: In recent years, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has drawn criticism from chemists who feel that the prize is more frequently awarded to non-chemists than to chemists. In the 30 years leading up to 2012, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded ten times for work classified as biochemistry or molecular biology, and once to a materials scientist. In the ten years leading up to 2012, only four prizes were awarded for work strictly in chemistry. Commenting on the scope of the award, "The Economist" explained that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is bound by Nobel's bequest, which specifies awards only in physics, chemistry, literature, medicine, and peace. Biology was in its infancy in Nobel's day and no award was established. "The Economist" argued there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics either, another major discipline, and added that Nobel's stipulation of no more than three winners is not readily applicable to modern physics, where progress is typically made through huge collaborations rather than by individuals alone.


title: Nobel Prize in Chemistry

text: In 2020, Ioannidis et al. reported that half of the Nobel Prizes for science awarded between 1995–2017 were clustered in just a few disciplines within their broader fields. Atomic physics, particle physics, cell biology, and neuroscience dominated the two subjects outside chemistry, while molecular chemistry was the chief prize-winning discipline in its domain. Molecular chemists won 5.3% of all science Nobel Prizes during this period.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Anthony George Banks (born 27 March 1950) is an English musician, songwriter and film composer primarily known as the keyboardist and founding member of the rock band Genesis. Banks is also a prolific solo artist, releasing six solo albums that range through progressive rock, pop, and classical music.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks co-founded Genesis in 1967 while studying at Charterhouse. He was their keyboardist and one of their principal songwriters and lyricists. He became a frequent user of the Hammond T-102 organ, Mellotron, ARP Pro Soloist and Yamaha CP-70 piano. In the band's earliest years Banks would play acoustic guitar for some of the mellow and pastoral songs.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In 2010, Banks was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis. In 2011, he was included on MusicRadar's list of the 27 greatest keyboard players of all time. In 2015, he was named "Prog God" at the Progressive Music Awards.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Anthony George Banks was born on 27 March 1950 in East Hoathly with Halland, East Sussex as the youngest of five children. He cites his mother, a pianist, as being particularly into music, and first listened to classical music albums that she owned from around six before he moved to musical theatre compositions by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Banks's elder brother introduced him to a wider variety, naming "Sixteen Tons" sung by Frankie Laine as one of the songs, and said, "By 1961, and for the next five to six years, I was music mad!" Banks started piano lessons at school at eight with the headmaster's wife, but did not enjoy tuition at first because he was "quite forced into it" by his parents until he grew to enjoy it. He considered himself an average piano player, and learned to recite pieces by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Maurice Ravel, his two favourite piano composers, by ear. At 13, he began lessons with an unsuitable teacher who made him lose interest in classical music, but he then started to recite songs by ear that he heard on the radio. Months later, he acquired a new piano teacher who sparked his interest in classical compositions once more, which became a deciding factor for Banks's decision to pursue a career in music. In addition to the piano, Banks taught himself to play the guitar.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: At seven, Banks began six years of study at Boarzell Preparatory School, a boarding school in Hurst Green. In September 1963, Banks began study at Charterhouse School, a private school in Godalming, Surrey. He studied classical piano as an extracurricular subject. Shortly after his arrival he befriended fellow pupil and future Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel, initially over their general distaste for the school's environment. They went on to play in Garden Wall, a school band with drummer Chris Stewart. In early 1967, they merged with guitarists Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips, two members of Anon, another school band, to record a series of demos which led to the formation of their new band Genesis.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks originally planned to study mathematics in higher education. After leaving Charterhouse, Banks began studying chemistry at Sussex University but soon switched to physics and philosophy. After a year at Sussex, he took a leave of absence in 1969 to explore a career with Genesis since the group had split but decided to reform and become a full-time professional band. Banks never returned to the university.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks's elaborate arrangements and keyboard solos – such as the piano introduction to "Firth of Fifth" and the instrumental sections of "The Cinema Show", "Watcher of the Skies", and "Supper's Ready" – helped to establish Genesis's sound. In addition to playing keyboards, Banks contributed (along with Anthony Phillips, Steve Hackett and Rutherford) to Genesis's 12-string acoustic passages in songs such as "The Musical Box", "Entangled", "The Cinema Show", and the beginning part of "Supper's Ready". Banks also was an occasional back-up vocalist and sang co-lead vocals on "Shepherd", an unreleased track from 1970 which finally surfaced on the "Genesis Archive 1967–75" boxed set. Notable Banks-penned Genesis songs (post Peter Gabriel) include "Mad Man Moon", "One for the Vine" and the anthemic ballad "Afterglow", which remained a popular coda to the Banks-driven medleys that the group played during live shows for years.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In 1997, Banks turned down an invitation to play on Steve Hackett's solo album "Genesis Revisited" as he disliked going over past material and an appearance would have added confusion to the fact that Genesis were close to putting out "Calling All Stations".


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: After Genesis split in 1998, Banks's career stagnated, and he considered retirement from music. It was during this time that he began composing, titling an early piece "Black Down" which led to his decision to pursue orchestra composition.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks first thought of making a solo album in 1975, following Gabriel's departure from Genesis. He had a group of songs in development at the time which were used on "A Trick of the Tail" (1976), their first album recorded without Gabriel, including "Mad Man Moon" and sections of "Entangled" and "Ripples".


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In 1979, after Genesis had entered a break in activity, Banks and Rutherford travelled to Polar Studios in Stockholm and recorded their first studio albums. Banks's album, "A Curious Feeling", was released first in October of that year. It was originally meant to be based and titled after the short story "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes, and Banks had written a complete set of lyrics for the story, but shelved the idea after he was made aware of an upcoming musical about the book. In addition to keyboards Banks plays the guitar and bass as he wanted the album to be "As personal as possible". He enlisted Kim Beacon of String Driven Thing as vocalist.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In June 1983, Banks released his second studio album, "The Fugitive". It remains unique as his only album to feature him as lead vocalist on all of the songs; a role he considered after recording guide vocals for Collins to sing for "Me and Sarah Jane" and "Keep It Dark" on the Genesis album "Abacab" (1981). Banks has employed guest vocalists on his solo albums; these have included Fish, Nik Kershaw, Toyah Willcox, Jack Hues and Jim Diamond.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In 1988, Banks recorded a pop and rock-oriented album under the group identity Bankstatement, featuring guitarist and co-producer Steve Hillage and singers Alistair Gordon and Jayney Klimek, plus additional musicians. Banks felt inspired to pursue the project having witnessed Rutherford enjoy the success of his own group, Mike + the Mechanics. Their eponymously-titled album was released in 1989. Banks also performed lead vocals on the song "Big Man."


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks released his fourth studio album, "Still", in April 1991 featuring Fish and Nik Kershaw. In contrast to his previous use of one or two vocalists on an album, he chose a greater number for "Still" as he saw little point in restricting himself and selected different people for tracks they suited best. As on the previous album, Banks took the lead vocal on one track (Hero For an Hour)


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks formed his second group project outside Genesis in 1994. He initially wanted to name the band Incognito, but found out there was another group with the name and chose Strictly Inc. It featured him with Wang Chung vocalist Jack Hues, and their eponymously-titled album saw a UK release in September 1995.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In 2004, after recording his classical album "Seven", Banks expressed an interest in recording another rock solo album but decided that the environment was becoming increasingly difficult in terms of securing a deal; yet the likelihood of it solely being an independent or online release did appeal to him. He added: "I'm not trying to prove anything. I haven't got to convince anybody. I don't have to worry about reviews or anything like that. You are just doing it for people who are familiar with what you are doing".


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In 1978, Banks and Rutherford were asked by musician and producer Rupert Hine to write music for the horror film "The Shout" (1978), after David Bowie was originally booked but failed to attend sessions. Hine recommended Genesis, and organised recording in a church without Collins as he was unavailable at short notice. The main theme that they developed was later featured on "From the Undertow" on Banks's solo album "A Curious Feeling".


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks's first major film score was for the 1983 loose remake "The Wicked Lady" (1983), for director Michael Winner. The soundtrack was released in April 1983 on Atlantic Records.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Around 1983, Banks was asked by director Peter Hyams to score the soundtrack to "" (1984), the sequel to the popular science fiction film "" (1968), having liked his work for "The Shout". However, the "masses" of music Banks had written was poorly received by Hyams which led to his departure from the project, leaving Banks disappointed. With months to spare, Banks accepted the job of scoring another science fiction film, "Lorca and the Outlaws" (1984), which came with no salary. Its low budget prevented Banks from using a professional studio, so he wrote the music using his own 16-track machine. Banks was also a contender to compose the music for "The Terminator" and was sent the script.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: His next soundtrack was the drama film "Quicksilver" (1986). Banks recalled the directors were more supportive towards him and the process went smoothly, but disliked their demand for more straightforward songs on the soundtrack in order to have a hit single that they could release. Among the tracks recorded was "Shortcut to Somewhere", a collaboration with Marillion singer Fish, which became the only single from Banks's solo career to chart in the UK when it reached number 75.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Selections of music written for "Lorca and the Outlaws" and "Quicksilver" were later released on Banks's compilation album "Soundtracks" (1986).


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks became interested in the music of Gustav Mahler after hearing it in the film "Death in Venice" (1971). He also cites Dmitri Shostakovich and Erik Satie as composers whose music he has enjoyed. He identifies Symphony No. 4 in A minor and Symphony No. 7 in C major by Jean Sibelius, and Symphony No. 5 in D major by Ralph Vaughan Williams as favourite pieces. Critics have noted that Vaughan Williams and film composer John Barry are notable influences on his own orchestral compositions. Banks has acknowledged similarities in style between his orchestral works and those of Vaughan Williams, Sibelius and Barry.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: In March 2004, Banks released his fourth studio album, and first of entirely classical music, entitled "Seven: A Suite for Orchestra" on Naxos Records. He had the idea for the album around six years prior to starting working on it, and felt encouraged after hearing the orchestral arrangements of his compositions for the soundtrack to "The Wicked Lady". It features seven compositions performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Banks on the piano for three tracks with conductor Mike Dixon.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: On 26 March 2012, Banks's second classical album was released (also on Naxos), entitled "Six Pieces for Orchestra", performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Paul Englishby. Tracks are: "Siren" featuring Martin Robertson on alto saxophone, "Still Waters", "Blade" with Charlie Siem on violin, "Wild Pilgrimage", "The Oracle" and "City of Gold".


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks's third classical music album, "Five", was released in February 2018. As he related in the album's booklet, "In 2013, I was approached to write a piece for the following year's Cheltenham Music Festival, which I readily agreed to as this seemed a good opportunity for me to have one of my orchestral pieces played live, which had not happened before...since then I have written more music, creating this suite...". It features five pieces performed by The Czech National Symphony Orchestra and Choir conducted by Nick Ingman, and Banks on piano and celeste.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Other recent projects includes writing music for operatic tenor John Potter and to a Shakespeare sonnet.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Music historian Wayne Studer has referred to Banks as "the most tasteful keyboardist of prog rock." Scott Solida of MusicRadar also described him as "tasteful and often restrained", whose "playing was always in service to the song." Solida added, "Banks exhibited a sense of arrangement and purpose so often missing in the excesses of his peers." In 2018, Philip Wilding of "Classic Rock" described Banks as "the most overlooked solo artist from Genesis".


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks has pioneered many unique keyboard and synthesizer sounds throughout his career; one of his achievements was the technique of using the trigger output of a Linn LM-1 drum machine to have the hi-hat pattern trigger an ARP Quadra synthesizer, creating such parts as the pulsating drum sound in "Mama" (from 1983's "Genesis") and "By You" on "The Fugitive" (1983). Another unique synth technique was used on the track "Who Dunnit?" from the 1981 album "Abacab"; a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 was programmed with a few sounds, and the patches were switched manually (via the panel preset tabs) while he played.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Known for his lack of flamboyance on stage, Banks did wear a snorkel for performances of "Who Dunnit?" on the "Abacab" tour.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks, who has played the piano for many years, achieved a distinctive sound by running all of his keyboards (as well as his 12-string guitar) into a mixing board and then running the signal output of the board into a Leslie speaker (both the mixer and the rotary speaker were homemade). This can clearly be heard on everything Banks plays on the "Genesis Live" album.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks's earliest setup included a Hammond L-100 organ, a Hohner Pianet N and a Mellotron MkII, all of which (as well as grand piano) are first heard on the "Trespass" album. Banks used the Pianet as both a substitute for a grand piano, and also as a lead instrument, with the use of a fuzz box (also homemade, similar to the Fender Blender). He would often duel with Hackett's guitar, as heard on tracks like "The Musical Box", "The Return of the Giant Hogweed", and "Supper's Ready". Banks in 1974 switched from his Pianet to an RMI 368 Electra Piano and Harpsichord, which was soon integrated into the sound of Genesis, as first heard at various points on "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" (1974) album. It was often effected with the homemade fuzz box and an MXR Phase 100 – later these pedals were inserted in the panel of the Electra Piano.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: The first synthesizer used by Banks was the monophonic ARP Pro Soloist, which Banks first acquired in 1973 along with a Hammond T-102 and a Mellotron M400 for the "Selling England by the Pound" album, replacing the Hammond L122 and the Mellotron MkII. With the release of the "Trick of the Tail" album in 1976 and onward, Banks made use of the ARP 2600, a semi-modular synthesizer, in the studio but never live. On 1978's "...And Then There Were Three..." the Polymoog (one of the first polyphonic synthesizers) was integrated into Banks' expansive array, which enabled more expressive and highly layered "colorful" textures along with his unique use of MXR Phase 100 and Boss CE-1 Chorus effects pedals on the Hammond T-102 organ. During this time, he also added a Roland RS-202 string and brass synthesizer to mainly replace the Mellotron, though not used live. He also briefly used a Fender Rhodes electric piano. He also acquired a Yamaha CP-70 electric grand piano, which, when put through a Boss chorus, would become a signature part of Banks' 1970's - 80's sound.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: He used this technique all the way up to "Duke" in 1980, when he made a major overhaul of his rig, dropping the ARP 2600, the ARP Pro-Soloist, the Mellotron and the RS-202 in favour of a Yamaha CS-80, a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, an ARP Quadra and a Roland VP-330. On "Abacab" in 1981, the organ was no longer featured; organ sounds were emulated using a Sequential Circuits Prophet 10 synthesizer through the Boss CE-1. For the album "Genesis" in 1983, he replaced the Polymoog with an E-mu Emulator digital sampler. He also added a NED Synclavier II, which also has had prominent features in Banks' career, such as on "Home by the Sea". His final changes in this rig were replacing the E-mu Emulator with an E-mu Emulator II+ and the Roland VP-330 with a Yamaha DX7 for "Invisible Touch". Since the "We Can't Dance" (1991) album, Banks has favoured Roland and Korg synthesizers, such as Roland JD-800 and Korg Wavestation.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Evolving technology and sampling has allowed him to use a smaller rig of 4 or 3 keyboards with an array of rack mounted synth modules to emulate many of the earlier sounds. His concert rigs since "When in Rome 2007" include Korg Wavestation and Roland A-90 keyboard acting as MIDI controllers for rack mounted Korg Wavestation SR, Roland JD-990, Yamaha TX7, E-mu Proteus I and II, and E-mu EIV, as well as Korg OASYS as a master keyboard.


title: Tony Banks (musician)

text: Banks married Margaret McBain on 29 July 1972. They had a one-day honeymoon as Banks was too busy with finishing the Genesis album "Foxtrot". Banks said: "The band felt sorry for me so they paid for her to come on the next tour". The couple have two children.


title: The Once and Future King

text: The Once and Future King is a collection of fantasy novels by T. H. White about the legend of King Arthur. It is loosely based upon the 1485 work "Le Morte d'Arthur" by Sir Thomas Malory. It was first published in 1958 as a collection of shorter novels published from 1938 to 1940, with some new or amended material. The title refers to a legend that Arthur will one day return as king.


title: The Once and Future King

text: Most of the book takes place in "Gramarye", the name that White gives to Britain, and chronicles the youth and education of King Arthur, his rule as a king, and the romance between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere. Arthur is supposed to have lived in the 5th and 6th centuries, but the book is set around the 14th century. Arthur is portrayed as an Anglo-Norman rather than a Briton; White refers to the actual monarchs of that period as "mythical". The book ends immediately before Arthur's final battle against his illegitimate son Mordred. White acknowledged that his book's source material is loosely derived from "Le Morte d'Arthur", although he reinterprets the events of that story from the perspective of a world recovering from World War II.


title: The Once and Future King

text: A final part called "The Book of Merlyn" (written 1941, published 1977) was published separately following White's death. It chronicles Arthur's final lessons from Merlyn before his death, although some parts of it were incorporated into the final editions of the previous books, mostly "The Sword in the Stone", after White became aware that the compiled text of "The Once and Future King" would not include his final volume. "The Book of Merlyn" was the volume that first contained the adventures with the ants and the geese. However, it still has independent value as the only text in which all Arthur's animals are brought together, and the final parts of his life are related.


title: The Once and Future King

text: The story starts in the final years of the rule of King Uther Pendragon. The first part, "The Sword in the Stone", chronicles Arthur's upbringing by his foster father Sir Ector, his rivalry and friendship with his foster brother Kay, and his initial training by Merlyn, a wizard who lives through time backwards. Merlyn, knowing the boy's destiny, teaches Arthur (known as "Wart") what it means to be a good king by turning him into various kinds of animals: fish, hawk, ant, goose, and badger. Each of the transformations is meant to teach Wart a lesson, which will prepare him for his future life.


title: The Once and Future King

text: Merlyn instills in Arthur the concept that the only justifiable reason for war is to prevent another from going to war and that contemporary human governments and powerful people exemplify the worst aspects of the rule of Might.


title: The Once and Future King

text: White revised the original "Sword in the Stone" heavily for the four-part book in 1958. He took out the wizards' duel between Merlyn and Madame Mim, the adventure with T. natrix the snake, and the episode with the giant Galapagas. The first of those was replaced with the adventure of the ants. In the Wart's adventure with Merlyn's owl, Archimedes, the boy Arthur becomes a wild goose instead of visiting the goddess Athena. In the adventure with Robin Hood in the original book, the outlaws take the boys to attack the Anthropophagi (cannibals) and the Wart kills a Sciopod. In the 1958 version, the boys lead an attack on Morgan le Fay's Castle Chariot and Kay kills a griffin. The revisions reflect White's preoccupation with political questions in "The Once and Future King", and generally give the first part of the work a more adult flavour.


title: The Once and Future King

text: In part two, "The Queen of Air and Darkness," White sets the stage for Arthur's demise by introducing the Orkney clan and detailing Arthur's seduction by their mother, his half-sister Queen Morgause. While the young king suppresses initial rebellions, Merlyn leads him to envision a means of harnessing potentially destructive Might for the cause of Right: the chivalric order of the Round Table.


title: The Once and Future King

text: The third part, "The Ill-Made Knight", shifts focus from King Arthur to the story of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere's forbidden love, the means they adopt to hide their affair from the King (although he already knows of it from Merlyn), and its effect on Elaine, Lancelot's sometime lover and the mother of his son Galahad.


title: The Once and Future King

text: "The Candle in the Wind" unites these narrative threads by telling how Mordred's hatred of his father and Sir Agravaine's hatred of Lancelot cause the eventual downfall of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the entire ideal kingdom of Camelot.


title: The Once and Future King

text: The book begins as a quite light-hearted account of the young Arthur's adventures and King Pellinore's interminable search for the Questing Beast. Parts of "The Sword in the Stone" read almost as a parody of Arthurian legend by virtue of White's prose style, which relies heavily on anachronisms. However, the tale gradually changes tone: "The Ill-Made Knight" becomes more meditative, and "The Candle in the Wind" finds Arthur brooding over death and his legacy.


title: The Once and Future King

text: White reinterprets the traditional Arthurian characters, often giving them motivations or traits more complex than or even contradictory to those in earlier versions of the legend. For example:


title: The Once and Future King

text: Floyd C. Gale praised "The Sword in the Stone" as "blithely comic and entirely delightful", stating that it was "in utter contrast to the mounting tragedy" of the other three volumes of the series. Fantasy historian Lin Carter called it "the single finest fantasy novel written in our time, or for that matter, ever written." Constance Grady of Vox also praised the novel, stating: "White was writing for a post–World War II audience, but his book has a vigor and clarity that makes it an urgent and important read today."


title: The Once and Future King

text: Although Walt Disney initially purchased the film rights to "The Ill-Made Knight" in 1944, he eventually produced an adaptation of "The Sword in the Stone" (released in 1963). This movie reflects more the sense of humour of Disney's team of animators than White's. The movie adds a more comical side to the original story, including song and dance, as in most Disney films.


title: The Once and Future King

text: Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's 1960 musical "Camelot" (which was made into a movie in 1967) is based mostly on the last two books of "The Once and Future King" and features White's idea of having Thomas Malory make a cameo appearance at the end, again as "Tom of Warwick".


title: The Once and Future King

text: BBC Radio produced a dramatised version of "The Sword in the Stone" for Children's Hour shortly after its publication in 1938. Incidental music for the serial was specially composed by Benjamin Britten.


title: The Once and Future King

text: A two-hour version of "The Sword in the Stone", dramatised by Neville Teller, was first broadcast as a "Saturday Night Theatre" on Boxing Day, 1981. Michael Hordern played Merlyn and Toby Robertson was the Wart. The cast included Pauline Letts, David Davis, Jeffrey Segal and Lewis Stringer. Benjamin Britten's incidental music, played by the English Sinfonia, was used in the production, which was by Graham Gauld.


title: The Once and Future King

text: BBC Radio 4 serialised the book in six one-hour episodes dramatised by Brian Sibley, beginning on Sunday 9 November 2014 with Paul Ready as Arthur and David Warner as Merlyn.


title: House (season 2)

text: The second season of "House" premiered on September 13, 2005 and ended on May 23, 2006. During the season, House tries to cope with his feelings for his ex-girlfriend Stacy Warner, who, after he diagnosed her husband with acute intermittent porphyria, has taken a job in the legal department of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.


title: House (season 2)

text: Sela Ward's chemistry with Hugh Laurie in the final two episodes of the first season was strong enough to have her character return in seven episodes of the second season.


title: House (season 2)

text: Laura Allen, Yareli Arizmendi, Matthew John Armstrong, Mackenzie Astin, Christine Avila, Marshall Bell, Peter Birkenhead, Tamara Braun, Yvette Nicole Brown, Dan Butler, Scott Michael Campbell, Christopher Carley, Jewel Christian, Michelle Clunie, Aasha Davis, Thomas Dekker, Stephanie Erb, Elle Fanning, Bruce French, Erica Gimpel, Greg Grunberg, Wings Hauser, Taraji P. Henson, Howard Hesseman, Wil Horneff, Ryan Hurst, James Immekus, LL Cool J, William Katt, Mimi Kennedy, Edward Kerr, Elias Koteas, Nathan Kress, Tom Lenk, Ron Livingston, Samantha Mathis, Jayma Mays, Eddie Mills, Cynthia Nixon, Michael O'Keefe, America Olivo, Kip Pardue, Randall Park, Sasha Pieterse, Kristoffer Polaha, Clifton Powell, Keri Lynn Pratt, Cameron Richardson, Charlie Robinson, Ignacio Serricchio, Vicellous Reon Shannon, Allison Smith, Christie Lynn Smith, D. B. Sweeney, Chris Tallman, Michelle Trachtenberg, Hillary Tuck, Alanna Ubach, Stephanie Venditto, Tom Verica, JR Villarreal and Julie Warner.


title: House (season 2)

text: The season gained high Nielsen ratings; "No Reason" was watched by 25.47 million viewers, the show's biggest audience ever at that point. Season two averaged 17.3 million viewers an episode, outperforming season one by 30%. The number of viewers made it the tenth most-watched show of the 2005–2006 television season.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: All My Life is a 2020 American romantic drama film directed by Marc Meyers, from a screenplay by Todd Rosenberg, based on the true story of Solomon Chau and Jennifer Carter, a young couple that rushes to put their wedding together after Solomon is diagnosed with liver cancer. The film stars Jessica Rothe, Harry Shum Jr., Kyle Allen, Chrissie Fit, Jay Pharoah, Marielle Scott, and Keala Settle.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: The film was theatrically released in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2020, and in the United States on December 4, 2020, by Universal Pictures. Critics praised the performances and chemistry of the leads, but noted the film as cliché.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: Based on a true story, Jenn and her friends decide to stop at a bar to have a few beers before dinner. They then run into Sol and his friends over a short discussion of UFC and embarrassing pickup lines to get a girl. After a few conversations over beer, Sol and Jenn start a seamless relationship. They then decide to live together so Sol can pursue his passion of being a chef after Sol expresses how working where he is currently isn't what he wants to do. After analyzing bills that are piling, up he decides to stay at work.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: The couple host friendsgiving and Sol starts to feel weird but ignores it. He whispers to Jen over a thank you toast to the friends and family that he put in his two weeks notice. Later in the season, he decides to propose to Jen with their family and friends singing their favorite song "Don’t Look Back in Anger" by Oasis. Sol starts working at Jenn's cousin's successful restaurant.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: One night, Sol wakes up in pain, screaming to Jen that something is wrong. They find out that Sol has a tumor and he reassures Jen that everything will be okay once the doctors get rid of it. Sol suggests to Jen if the news is bad, they should get a dog. After getting the lab work back from the doctor, he tells them that everything is fine and that the labs are good. They decide to continue planning the wedding and Sol returns back to the restaurant with his dish on the menu. One day, Sol texts Jen telling her to come home. He greets her with a dog named Otis, and after a month or two, his cancer has progressed and he needs to start clinical trial for his recovery. They discuss postponing the wedding, but their friends suggest throwing them a quick wedding in three weeks with the help of strangers and friends while Sol does his treatment. In the midst of planning the wedding, Sol's friend Kyle misses everything because his illness reminds him of losing his dad which he hasn't dealt with. Sol talks to Jenn about having all the side effects of the trial, such as not being able to taste food and that she should just move on with her life. She tells him that she is here with him and he isn't alone. Jenn and Sol get married in front of all their friends and family. After the wedding, Kyle shows up to the reception.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: Jenn and Sol get Sol's x-rays and the doctor tells Jen that the cancer has spread to his whole liver and other areas and that she should ask Sol anything she wants because it is time. Jenn and Sol prepare for him to pass soon by writing his eulogy.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: Jenn walks to Dave and Kyle's new restaurant/bar, called Now or Never, which was Sol's favorite line. Jenn talks about Sol and his inspiration he had on everyone. Amanda and Megan tell Jenn that it's time for her to open up Sol's gift for their honeymoon which they had been keeping a secret for this moment, after his death. On a flash drive, there is a video of Sol thanking Jenn for loving him during the time they spent together. Jenn says she will live for today for the rest of her life because of Sol.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: The film was announced in August 2017, with Universal Pictures distributing a script written by Todd Rosenberg. In December 2017, the film was revealed to be on that year's "Black List" of most-liked unproduced screenplays. In July 2018, it was announced Marc Meyers would direct the film. Jessica Rothe was cast that September, and Harry Shum Jr. joined the cast the following month. Michael Masini, Chrissie Fit, Greg Vrotsos, Jay Pharoah, Marielle Scott, Kyle Allen, Mario Cantone, Keala Settle, and Ever Carradine later filled out the rest of the main cast. In December 2019, Josh Brener and Jon Rudnitsky joined the cast of the film.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: "All My Life" was theatrically released in the United States on December 4, 2020, by Universal Pictures, followed by a video-on-demand release on December 23. It was released in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2020.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: The film grossed $370,315 from 970 theaters in its opening weekend, finishing fourth at the box office. In its sophomore weekend it fell 42% to $215,000. Upon being released to digital rental platforms, the film eighth-most rented title on FandangoNow.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 57% based on 46 reviews, with an average rating of 5.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads, ""All My Life" benefits from some real chemistry between its leads, even if it's undermined by an aggressive reliance on heartstring-tugging sentimentality." According to Metacritic, which sampled nine critics and calculated a weighted average score of 39 out of 100, the film received "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported 72% of audience members gave the film a positive score, with 51% saying they would definitely recommend it.


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: Carlos Aguilar of "The A.V. Club" gave the film a "D−" and wrote: ""All My Life" is too passionless to earn even a begrudged sniffle. It's all paint-by-numbers, from the requisite 'screaming inside a car' shot expressing a character's frustrations to the store-bought spontaneity of a couple jumping into a fountain fully clothed."


title: All My Life (2020 film)

text: However, Steve Pond of TheWrap noted that ""All My Life" is nothing if not pleasant and amiable as it makes its way down the road to heartwarming" and Courtney Howard of Variety wrote "The warmth and touching tenderness of "All My Life" melts even the coldest of hearts in its quest to deliver happy and sad tears. Unlike the phony, syrupy, and predictably manipulative devices of a Nicholas Sparks romance, this three-hankie weepie holds a surprising amount of heart and hope to accompany all the cathartic crying."


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape, however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by the Netscape Communicator suite in 1997. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Netscape-developed Mozilla Application Suite, which was later renamed SeaMonkey. Netscape's Mozilla Suite also served as the base for a browser-only spinoff called Mozilla Firefox.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The Netscape Navigator name returned in 2007 when AOL announced version 9 of the Netscape series of browsers, Netscape Navigator 9. On 28 December 2007, AOL canceled its development but continued supporting the web browser with security updates until 1 March 2008. AOL allows downloading of archived versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser family.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Netscape Navigator was inspired by the success of the Mosaic web browser, which was co-written by Marc Andreessen, a part-time employee of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. After Andreessen graduated in 1993, he moved to California and there met Jim Clark, the recently departed founder of Silicon Graphics. Clark believed that the Mosaic browser had great commercial possibilities and provided the seed money. Soon Mosaic Communications Corporation was in business in Mountain View, California, with Andreessen as a vice-president. Since the University of Illinois was unhappy with the company's use of the Mosaic name, the company changed its name to Netscape Communications (suggested by product manager Greg Sands) and named its flagship web browser Netscape Navigator.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Netscape announced in its first press release (13 October 1994) that it would make Navigator available without charge to all non-commercial users, and beta versions of version 1.0 and 1.1 were freely downloadable in November 1994 and March 1995, with the full version 1.0 available in December 1994. However, two months later, the company announced that only educational and non-profit institutions could use version 1.0 at no charge.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The reversal was complete with the availability of version 1.1 beta on 6 March 1995, in which a press release states that the final 1.1 release would be available at no cost only for academic and non-profit organizational use.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online, with boxed versions available on floppy disks (and later CDs) in stores along with a period of phone support. During this era, "Internet Starter Kit" books were popular, and usually included a floppy disk or CD containing internet software, and this was a popular means of obtaining Netscape's and other browsers. Email support was initially free and remained so for a year or two until the volume of support requests grew too high.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: During development, the Netscape browser was known by the code name "Mozilla", which became the name of a Godzilla-like cartoon dragon mascot used prominently on the company's web site. The Mozilla name was also used as the User-Agent in HTTP requests by the browser. Other web browsers claimed to be compatible with Netscape's extensions to HTML and therefore used the same name in their User-Agent identifiers so that web servers would send them the same pages as were sent to Netscape browsers. Mozilla is now a generic name for matters related to the open source successor to Netscape Communicator and is most identified with the browser Firefox.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: When the consumer Internet revolution arrived in the mid-1990s, Netscape was well-positioned to take advantage of it. With a good mix of features and an attractive licensing scheme that allowed free use for non-commercial purposes, the Netscape browser soon became the de facto standard, particularly on the Windows platform. Internet service providers and computer magazine publishers helped make Navigator readily available.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: An innovation that Netscape introduced in 1994 was the on-the-fly display of web pages, where text and graphics appeared on the screen as the web page downloaded. Earlier web browsers would not display a page until all graphics on it had been loaded over the network connection; this meant a user might have only a blank page for several minutes. With Netscape, people using dial-up connections could begin reading the text of a web page within seconds of entering a web address, even before the rest of the text and graphics had finished downloading. This made the web much more tolerable to the average user.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Through the late 1990s, Netscape made sure that Navigator remained the technical leader among web browsers. New features included cookies, frames, proxy auto-config, and JavaScript (in version 2.0). Although those and other innovations eventually became open standards of the W3C and ECMA and were emulated by other browsers, they were often viewed as controversial. Netscape, according to critics, was more interested in bending the web to its own de facto "standards" (bypassing standards committees and thus marginalizing the commercial competition) than it was in fixing bugs in its products. Consumer rights advocates were particularly critical of cookies and of commercial web sites using them to invade individual privacy.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: In the marketplace, however, these concerns made little difference. Netscape Navigator remained the market leader with more than 50% usage share. The browser software was available for a wide range of operating systems, including Windows (3.1, 95, 98, NT), Macintosh, Linux, OS/2, and many versions of Unix including OSF/1, Sun Solaris, BSD/OS, IRIX, AIX, and HP-UX, and looked and worked nearly identically on every one of them. Netscape began to experiment with prototypes of a web-based system, known internally as "Constellation", which would allow a user to access and edit his or her files anywhere across a network no matter what computer or operating system he or she happened to be using.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Industry observers forecast the dawn of a new era of connected computing. The underlying operating system, it was believed, would not be an important consideration; future applications would run within a web browser. This was seen by Netscape as a clear opportunity to entrench Navigator at the heart of the next generation of computing, and thus gain the opportunity to expand into all manner of other software and service markets.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: With the success of Netscape showing the importance of the web (more people were using the Internet due in part to the ease of using Netscape), Internet browsing began to be seen as a potentially profitable market. Following Netscape's lead, Microsoft started a campaign to enter the web browser software market. Like Netscape before them, Microsoft licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass, Inc. (which in turn licensed code from University of Illinois). Using this basic code, Microsoft created Internet Explorer (IE).


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The competition between Microsoft and Netscape dominated the browser wars. Internet Explorer, Version 1.0 (shipped in the Internet Jumpstart Kit in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95) and IE, Version 2.0 (the first cross-platform version of the web browser, supporting both Windows and Mac OS) were thought by many to be inferior and primitive when compared to contemporary versions of Netscape Navigator. With the release of IE version 3.0 (1996) Microsoft was able to catch up with Netscape competitively, with IE Version 4.0 (1997) further improvement in terms of market share. IE 5.0 (1999) improved stability and took significant market share from Netscape Navigator for the first time.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: There were two versions of Netscape Navigator 3.0, the Standard Edition and the Gold Edition. The latter consisted of the Navigator browser with e-mail, news readers, and a WYSIWYG web page compositor; however, these extra functions enlarged and slowed the software, rendering it prone to crashing.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: This Gold Edition was renamed Netscape Communicator starting with version 4.0; the name change diluted its name-recognition and confused users. Netscape CEO James L. Barksdale insisted on the name change because Communicator was a general-purpose "client" application, which contained the Navigator "browser".


title: Netscape Navigator

text: The aging Netscape Communicator 4.x was slower than Internet Explorer 5.0. Typical web pages had become heavily illustrated, often JavaScript-intensive, and encoded with HTML features designed for specific purposes but now employed as global layout tools (HTML tables, the most obvious example of this, were especially difficult for Communicator to render). The Netscape browser, once a solid product, became crash-prone and buggy; for example, some versions re-downloaded an entire web page to re-render it when the browser window was re-sized (a nuisance to dial-up users), and the browser would usually crash when the page contained simple Cascading Style Sheets, as proper support for CSS never made it into Communicator 4.x. At the time that Communicator 4.0 was being developed, Netscape had a competing technology called JavaScript Style Sheets. Near the end of the development cycle, it became obvious that CSS would prevail, so Netscape quickly implemented a CSS to JSSS converter, which then processed CSS as JSSS (this is why turning JavaScript off also disabled CSS). Moreover, Netscape Communicator's browser interface design appeared dated in comparison to Internet Explorer and interface changes in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: By the end of the decade, Netscape's web browser had lost dominance over the Windows platform, and the August 1997 Microsoft financial agreement to invest one hundred and fifty million dollars in Apple Computer required that Apple make Internet Explorer the default web browser in new Mac OS distributions. The latest IE Mac release at that time was Internet Explorer version 3.0 for Macintosh, but Internet Explorer 4 was released later that year.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Microsoft succeeded in having ISPs and PC vendors distribute Internet Explorer to their customers instead of Netscape Navigator, mostly due to Microsoft using its leverage from Windows OEM licenses, and partly aided by Microsoft's investment in making IE brandable, such that a customized version of IE could be offered. Also, web developers used proprietary, browser-specific extensions in web pages. Both Microsoft and Netscape did this, having added many proprietary HTML tags to their browsers, which forced users to choose between two competing and almost incompatible web browsers.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: In March 1998, Netscape released most of the development code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. Only pre-alpha versions of Netscape 5 were released before the open source community decided to scrap the Netscape Navigator codebase entirely and build a new web browser around the Gecko layout engine which Netscape had been developing but which had not yet incorporated. The community-developed open source project was named "Mozilla", Netscape Navigator's original code name. America Online bought Netscape; Netscape programmers took a pre-beta-quality form of the Mozilla codebase, gave it a new GUI, and released it as Netscape 6. This did nothing to win back users, who continued to migrate to Internet Explorer. After the release of Netscape 7 and a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko layout engine, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: On 28 December 2007, the Netscape developers announced that AOL had canceled development of Netscape Navigator, leaving it unsupported as of 1 March 2008. Archived and unsupported versions of the browser remain available for download.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: Netscape's contributions to the web include JavaScript, which was submitted as a new standard to Ecma International. The resultant ECMAScript specification allowed JavaScript support by multiple web browsers and its use as a cross-browser scripting language, long after Netscape Navigator itself had dropped in popularity. Another example is the FRAME tag, which is widely supported today, and that has been incorporated into official web standards such as the "HTML 4.01 Frameset" specification.


title: Netscape Navigator

text: In a 2007 "PC World" column, the original Netscape Navigator was considered the "best tech product of all time" due to its impact on the Internet.


title: Canal

text: Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flow under atmospheric pressure, and can be thought of as artificial rivers.


title: Canal

text: In most cases, a canal has a series of dams and locks that create reservoirs of low speed current flow. These reservoirs are referred to as "slack water levels", often just called "levels". A canal can be called a "navigation canal" when it parallels a natural river and shares part of the latter's discharges and drainage basin, and leverages its resources by building dams and locks to increase and lengthen its stretches of slack water levels while staying in its valley.


title: Canal

text: A canal can cut across a drainage divide atop a ridge, generally requiring an external water source above the highest elevation. The best-known example of such a canal is the Panama Canal.


title: Canal

text: Many canals have been built at elevations, above valleys and other waterways. Canals with sources of water at a higher level can deliver water to a destination such as a city where water is needed. The Roman Empire's aqueducts were such water supply canals.


title: Canal

text: A "navigation" is a series of channels that run roughly parallel to the valley and stream bed of an unimproved river. A navigation always shares the drainage basin of the river. A vessel uses the calm parts of the river itself as well as improvements, traversing the same changes in height.


title: Canal

text: A true "canal" is a channel that cuts across a drainage divide, making a navigable channel connecting two different drainage basins.


title: Canal

text: In gardening and landscaping, especially historically, a canal is an artificial piece of water, typically long, thin, and straight-sided, fed by a stream that is diverted and dammed. They are typical of the French formal garden style of the 17th century, and the Dutch garden variant which was influential in England. The example in the restored Westbury Court Garden, of c. 1700, is long.


title: Canal

text: Most commercially important canals of the first half of the 19th century were a little of each, using rivers in long stretches, and divide crossing canals in others. This is true for many canals still in use. Canals are an efficient way of traveling as it was easier for people to get to areas faster than horse wagons.


title: Canal

text: Since they cut across drainage divides, canals are more difficult to construct and often need additional improvements, like viaducts and aqueducts to bridge waters over streams and roads, and ways to keep water in the channel.


title: Canal

text: Historically canals were of immense importance to commerce and the development, growth and vitality of a civilization. In 1855 the Lehigh Canal carried over 1.2 million tons of anthracite coal; by the 1930s the company which built and operated it over a century pulled the plug. The few canals still in operation in our modern age are a fraction of the numbers that once fueled and enabled economic growth, indeed were practically a prerequisite to further urbanization and industrialization. For the movement of bulk raw materials such as coal and ores are difficult and marginally affordable without water transport. Such raw materials fueled the industrial developments and new metallurgy resulting of the spiral of increasing mechanization during 17th–20th century, leading to new research disciplines, new industries and economies of scale, raising the standard of living for any industrialized society.


title: Canal

text: Most ship canals today primarily service bulk cargo and large ship transportation industries, whereas the once critical smaller inland waterways conceived and engineered as boat and barge canals have largely been supplanted and filled in, abandoned and left to deteriorate, or kept in service and staffed by state employees, where dams and locks are maintained for flood control or pleasure boating. Their replacement was gradual, beginning first in the United States in the mid-1850s where canal shipping was first augmented by, then began being replaced by using "much faster", less geographically constrained & limited, and generally cheaper to maintain railways.


title: Canal

text: By the early 1880s, canals which had little ability to economically compete with rail transport, were off the map. In the next couple of decades, coal was increasingly diminished as the heating fuel of choice by oil, and growth of coal shipments leveled off. Later, after World War I when motor-trucks came into their own, the last small U.S. barge canals saw a steady decline in cargo ton-miles alongside many railways, the flexibility and steep slope climbing capability of lorries taking over cargo hauling increasingly as road networks were improved, and which also had the freedom to make deliveries well away from rail lined road beds or ditches in the dirt which couldn't operate in the winter.


title: Canal

text: The longest extant canal today, the Grand Canal in northern China, still remains in heavy use, especially the portion south of the Yellow River. It stretches from Beijing to Hangzhou at 1,794 kilometres (1,115 miles).


title: Canal

text: Canals are built in one of three ways, or a combination of the three, depending on available water and available path:


title: Canal

text: Smaller transportation canals can carry barges or narrowboats, while ship canals allow seagoing ships to travel to an inland port (e.g., Manchester Ship Canal), or from one sea or ocean to another (e.g., Caledonian Canal, Panama Canal).


title: Canal

text: At their simplest, canals consist of a trench filled with water. Depending on the stratum the canal passes through, it may be necessary to line the cut with some form of watertight material such as clay or concrete. When this is done with clay, it is known as puddling.


title: Canal

text: Canals need to be level, and while small irregularities in the lie of the land can be dealt with through cuttings and embankments, for larger deviations other approaches have been adopted. The most common is the pound lock, which consists of a chamber within which the water level can be raised or lowered connecting either two pieces of canal at a different level or the canal with a river or the sea. When there is a hill to be climbed, flights of many locks in short succession may be used.


title: Canal

text: Prior to the development of the pound lock in 984 AD in China by Chhaio Wei-Yo and later in Europe in the 15th century, either flash locks consisting of a single gate were used or ramps, sometimes equipped with rollers, were used to change the level. Flash locks were only practical where there was plenty of water available.


title: Canal

text: Locks use a lot of water, so builders have adopted other approaches for situations where little water is available. These include boat lifts, such as the Falkirk Wheel, which use a caisson of water in which boats float while being moved between two levels; and inclined planes where a caisson is hauled up a steep railway.


title: Canal

text: To cross a stream, road or valley (where the delay caused by a flight of locks at either side would be unacceptable) the valley can be spanned by a navigable aqueduct – a famous example in Wales is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) across the valley of the River Dee.


title: Canal

text: Another option for dealing with hills is to tunnel through them. An example of this approach is the Harecastle Tunnel on the Trent and Mersey Canal. Tunnels are only practical for smaller canals.


title: Canal

text: Some canals attempted to keep changes in level down to a minimum. These canals known as contour canals would take longer, winding routes, along which the land was a uniform altitude. Other, generally later, canals took more direct routes requiring the use of various methods to deal with the change in level.


title: Canal

text: Canals have various features to tackle the problem of water supply. In cases, like the Suez Canal, the canal is open to the sea. Where the canal is not at sea level, a number of approaches have been adopted. Taking water from existing rivers or springs was an option in some cases, sometimes supplemented by other methods to deal with seasonal variations in flow. Where such sources were unavailable, reservoirs – either separate from the canal or built into its course – and back pumping were used to provide the required water. In other cases, water pumped from mines was used to feed the canal. In certain cases, extensive "feeder canals" were built to bring water from sources located far from the canal.


title: Canal

text: Where large amounts of goods are loaded or unloaded such as at the end of a canal, a canal basin may be built. This would normally be a section of water wider than the general canal. In some cases, the canal basins contain wharfs and cranes to assist with movement of goods.


title: Canal

text: When a section of the canal needs to be sealed off so it can be drained for maintenance stop planks are frequently used. These consist of planks of wood placed across the canal to form a dam. They are generally placed in pre-existing grooves in the canal bank. On more modern canals, "guard locks" or gates were sometimes placed to allow a section of the canal to be quickly closed off, either for maintenance, or to prevent a major loss of water due to a canal breach.


title: Canal

text: The transport capacity of pack animals and carts is limited. A mule can carry an eighth-ton [] maximum load over a journey measured in days and weeks, though much more for shorter distances and periods with appropriate rest. Besides, carts need roads. Transport over water is much more efficient and cost-effective for large cargoes.


title: Canal

text: The oldest known canals were irrigation canals, built in Mesopotamia circa 4000 BC, in what is now Iraq. The Indus Valley civilization of ancient India (circa 3000 BC) had sophisticated irrigation and storage systems developed, including the reservoirs built at Girnar in 3000 BC. This is the first time that such planned civil project had taken place in the ancient world. In Egypt, canals date back at least to the time of Pepi I Meryre (reigned 2332–2283 BC), who ordered a canal built to bypass the cataract on the Nile near Aswan.


title: Canal

text: In ancient China, large canals for river transport were established as far back as the Spring and Autumn Period (8th–5th centuries BC), the longest one of that period being the Hong Gou (Canal of the Wild Geese), which according to the ancient historian Sima Qian connected the old states of Song, Zhang, Chen, Cai, Cao, and Wei. The Caoyun System of canals was essential for imperial taxation, which was largely assessed in kind and involved enormous shipments of rice and other grains. By far the longest canal was the Grand Canal of China, still the longest canal in the world today and the oldest extant one. It is long and was built to carry the Emperor Yang Guang between Zhuodu (Beijing) and Yuhang (Hangzhou). The project began in 605 and was completed in 609, although much of the work combined older canals, the oldest section of the canal existing since at least 486 BC. Even in its narrowest urban sections it is rarely less than wide.


title: Canal

text: Greek engineers were also among the first to use canal locks, by which they regulated the water flow in the Ancient Suez Canal as early as the 3rd century BC.


title: Canal

text: There was little experience moving bulk loads by carts, while a pack-horse would [i.e. 'could'] carry only an eighth of a ton. On a soft road a horse might be able to draw 5/8ths of a ton. But if the load were carried by a barge on a waterway, then up to 30 tons could be drawn by the same horse.— technology historian Ronald W. Clark referring to transport realities before the industrial revolution and the Canal age.


title: Canal

text: Hohokam was a society in the North American Southwest in what is now part of Arizona, United States, and Sonora, Mexico. Their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by 1300 CE. Archaeologists working at a major archaeological dig in the 1990s in the Tucson Basin, along the Santa Cruz River, identified a culture and people that may have been the ancestors of the Hohokam. This prehistoric group occupied southern Arizona as early as 2000 BCE, and in the Early Agricultural Period grew corn, lived year-round in sedentary villages, and developed sophisticated irrigation canals.


title: Canal

text: The large-scale Hohokam irrigation network in the Phoenix metropolitan area was the most complex in ancient North America. A portion of the ancient canals has been renovated for the Salt River Project and now helps to supply the city's water.


title: Canal

text: In the Middle Ages, water transport was several times cheaper and faster than transport overland. Overland transport by animal drawn conveyances was used around settled areas, but unimproved roads required pack animal trains, usually of mules to carry any degree of mass, and while a mule could carry an eighth ton, it also needed teamsters to tend it and one man could only tend perhaps five mules, meaning overland bulk transport was also expensive, as men expect compensation in the form of wages, room and board. This was because long-haul roads were unpaved, more often than not too narrow for carts, much less wagons, and in poor condition, wending their way through forests, marshy or muddy quagmires as often as unimproved but dry footing. In that era, as today, greater cargoes, especially bulk goods and raw materials, could be transported by ship far more economically than by land; in the pre-railroad days of the industrial revolution, water transport was the gold standard of fast transportation. The first artificial canal in Western Europe was the Fossa Carolina built at the end of the 8th century under personal supervision of Charlemagne.


title: Canal

text: In Britain, the "Glastonbury Canal " is believed to be the first post-Roman canal and was built in the middle of the 10th century to link the River Brue at Northover with Glastonbury Abbey, a distance of about . Its initial purpose is believed to be the transport of building stone for the abbey, but later it was used for delivering produce, including grain, wine and fish, from the abbey's outlying properties. It remained in use until at least the 14th century, but possibly as late as the mid-16th century.More lasting and of more economic impact were canals like the Naviglio Grande built between 1127 and 1257 to connect Milan with the Ticino River. The Naviglio Grande is the most important of the lombard "navigli" and the oldest functioning canal in Europe.Later, canals were built in the Netherlands and Flanders to drain the polders and assist transportation of goods and people.


title: Canal

text: Canal building was revived in this age because of commercial expansion from the 12th century. River navigations were improved progressively by the use of single, or flash locks. Taking boats through these used large amounts of water leading to conflicts with watermill owners and to correct this, the pound or chamber lock first appeared, in the 10th century in China and in Europe in 1373 in Vreeswijk, Netherlands. Another important development was the mitre gate, which was, it is presumed, introduced in Italy by Bertola da Novate in the 16th century. This allowed wider gates and also removed the height restriction of guillotine locks.


title: Canal

text: To break out of the limitations caused by river valleys, the first summit level canals were developed with the Grand Canal of China in 581–617 AD whilst in Europe the first, also using single locks, was the Stecknitz Canal in Germany in 1398.


title: Canal

text: In the Songhai Empire of West Africa, several canals were constructed under Sunni Ali and Askia Muhammad between Kabara and Timbuktu in the 15th century. These were used primarily for irrigation and transport. Sunni Ali also attempted to construct a canal from the Niger River to Walata to facilitate conquest of the city but his progress was halted when he went to war with the Mossi Kingdoms.


title: Canal

text: Around 1500–1800 the first summit level canal to use pound locks in Europe was the Briare Canal connecting the Loire and Seine (1642), followed by the more ambitious Canal du Midi (1683) connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. This included a staircase of 8 locks at Béziers, a tunnel, and three major aqueducts.


title: Canal

text: Canal building progressed steadily in Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries with three great rivers, the Elbe, Oder and Weser being linked by canals. In post-Roman Britain, the first early modern period canal built appears to have been the Exeter Canal, which was surveyed in 1563, and open in 1566.


title: Canal

text: The oldest canal in the European settlements of North America, technically a mill race built for industrial purposes, is Mother Brook between the Boston, Massachusetts neighbourhoods of Dedham and Hyde Park connecting the higher waters of the Charles River and the mouth of the Neponset River and the sea. It was constructed in 1639 to provide water power for mills.


title: Canal

text: In Russia, the Volga–Baltic Waterway, a nationwide canal system connecting the Baltic Sea and Caspian Sea via the Neva and Volga rivers, was opened in 1718.


title: Canal

text: The modern canal system was mainly a product of the 18th century and early 19th century. It came into being because the Industrial Revolution (which began in Britain during the mid-18th century) demanded an economic and reliable way to transport goods and commodities in large quantities.


title: Canal

text: By the early 18th century, river navigations such as the Aire and Calder Navigation were becoming quite sophisticated, with pound locks and longer and longer "cuts" (some with intermediate locks) to avoid circuitous or difficult stretches of river. Eventually, the experience of building long multi-level cuts with their own locks gave rise to the idea of building a "pure" canal, a waterway designed on the basis of where goods needed to go, not where a river happened to be.


title: Canal

text: The claim for the first pure canal in Great Britain is debated between "Sankey" and "Bridgewater" supporters. The first true canal in what is now the United Kingdom was the Newry Canal in Northern Ireland constructed by Thomas Steers in 1741.


title: Canal

text: The Sankey Brook Navigation, which connected St Helens with the River Mersey, is often claimed as the first modern "purely artificial" canal because although originally a scheme to make the Sankey Brook navigable, it included an entirely new artificial channel that was effectively a canal along the Sankey Brook valley. However, "Bridgewater" supporters point out that the last quarter-mile of the navigation is indeed a canalized stretch of the Brook, and that it was the Bridgewater Canal (less obviously associated with an existing river) that captured the popular imagination and inspired further canals.


title: Canal

text: In the mid-eighteenth century the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who owned a number of coal mines in northern England, wanted a reliable way to transport his coal to the rapidly industrializing city of Manchester. He commissioned the engineer James Brindley to build a canal for that purpose. Brindley's design included an aqueduct carrying the canal over the River Irwell. This was an engineering wonder which immediately attracted tourists. The construction of this canal was funded entirely by the Duke and was called the Bridgewater Canal. It opened in 1761 and was the first major British canal.<ref name="N/A 1978 990"></ref>


title: Canal

text: The new canals proved highly successful. The boats on the canal were horse-drawn with a towpath alongside the canal for the horse to walk along. This horse-drawn system proved to be highly economical and became standard across the British canal network. Commercial horse-drawn canal boats could be seen on the UK's canals until as late as the 1950s, although by then diesel-powered boats, often towing a second unpowered boat, had become standard.


title: Canal

text: The canal boats could carry thirty tons at a time with only one horse pulling – more than ten times the amount of cargo per horse that was possible with a cart. Because of this huge increase in supply, the Bridgewater canal reduced the price of coal in Manchester by nearly two-thirds within just a year of its opening. The Bridgewater was also a huge financial success, with it earning what had been spent on its construction within just a few years.


title: Canal

text: This success proved the viability of canal transport, and soon industrialists in many other parts of the country wanted canals. After the Bridgewater canal, early canals were built by groups of private individuals with an interest in improving communications. In Staffordshire the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood saw an opportunity to bring bulky cargoes of clay to his factory doors and to transport his fragile finished goods to market in Manchester, Birmingham or further away, by water, minimizing breakages. Within just a few years of the Bridgewater's opening, an embryonic national canal network came into being, with the construction of canals such as the Oxford Canal and the Trent & Mersey Canal.


title: Canal

text: The new canal system was both cause and effect of the rapid industrialization of The Midlands and the north. The period between the 1770s and the 1830s is often referred to as the "Golden Age" of British canals.


title: Canal

text: For each canal, an Act of Parliament was necessary to authorize construction, and as people saw the high incomes achieved from canal tolls, canal proposals came to be put forward by investors interested in profiting from dividends, at least as much as by people whose businesses would profit from cheaper transport of raw materials and finished goods.


title: Canal

text: In a further development, there was often out-and-out speculation, where people would try to buy shares in a newly floated company to sell them on for an immediate profit, regardless of whether the canal was ever profitable, or even built. During this period of "canal mania", huge sums were invested in canal building, and although many schemes came to nothing, the canal system rapidly expanded to nearly 4,000 miles (over 6,400 kilometres) in length.


title: Canal

text: Many rival canal companies were formed and competition was rampant. Perhaps the best example was Worcester Bar in Birmingham, a point where the Worcester and Birmingham Canal and the Birmingham Canal Navigations Main Line were only seven feet apart. For many years, a dispute about tolls meant that goods travelling through Birmingham had to be portaged from boats in one canal to boats in the other.


title: Canal

text: Canal companies were initially chartered by individual states in the United States. These early canals were constructed, owned, and operated by private joint-stock companies. Four were completed when the War of 1812 broke out; these were the South Hadley Canal (opened 1795) in Massachusetts, Santee Canal (opened 1800) in South Carolina, the Middlesex Canal (opened 1802) also in Massachusetts, and the Dismal Swamp Canal (opened 1805) in Virginia. The Erie Canal (opened 1825) was chartered and owned by the state of New York and financed by bonds bought by private investors. The Erie canal runs about from Albany, New York, on the Hudson River to Buffalo, New York, at Lake Erie. The Hudson River connects Albany to the Atlantic port of New York City and the Erie Canal completed a navigable water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. The canal contains 36 locks and encompasses a total elevation differential of around 565 ft. (169 m). The Erie Canal with its easy connections to most of the U.S. mid-west and New York City soon quickly paid back all its invested capital (US$7 million) and started turning a profit. By cutting transportation costs in half or more it became a large profit center for Albany and New York City as it allowed the cheap transportation of many of the agricultural products grown in the mid west of the United States to the rest of the world. From New York City these agricultural products could easily be shipped to other U.S. states or overseas. Assured of a market for their farm products the settlement of the U.S. mid-west was greatly accelerated by the Erie Canal. The profits generated by the Erie Canal project started a canal building boom in the United States that lasted until about 1850 when railroads started becoming seriously competitive in price and convenience. The Blackstone Canal (finished in 1828) in Massachusetts and Rhode Island fulfilled a similar role in the early industrial revolution between 1828 and 1848. The Blackstone Valley was a major contributor of the American Industrial Revolution where Samuel Slater built his first textile mill.


title: Canal

text: A power canal refers to a canal used for hydraulic power generation, rather than for transport. Nowadays power canals are built almost exclusively as parts of hydroelectric power stations. Parts of the United States, particularly in the Northeast, had enough fast-flowing rivers that water power was the primary means of powering factories (usually textile mills) until after the American Civil War. For example, Lowell, Massachusetts, considered to be "The Cradle of the American Industrial Revolution," has of canals, built from around 1790 to 1850, that provided water power and a means of transportation for the city. The output of the system is estimated at 10,000 horsepower. Other cities with extensive power canal systems include Lawrence, Massachusetts, Holyoke, Massachusetts, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Augusta, Georgia. The most notable power canal was built in 1862 for the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company.


title: Canal

text: Competition, from railways from the 1830s and roads in the 20th century, made the smaller canals obsolete for most commercial transport, and many of the British canals fell into decay. Only the Manchester Ship Canal and the Aire and Calder Canal bucked this trend. Yet in other countries canals grew in size as construction techniques improved. During the 19th century in the US, the length of canals grew from to over 4,000, with a complex network making the Great Lakes navigable, in conjunction with Canada, although some canals were later drained and used as railroad rights-of-way.


title: Canal

text: In the United States, navigable canals reached into isolated areas and brought them in touch with the world beyond. By 1825 the Erie Canal, long with 36 locks, opened up a connection from the populated Northeast to the Great Lakes. Settlers flooded into regions serviced by such canals, since access to markets was available. The Erie Canal (as well as other canals) was instrumental in lowering the differences in commodity prices between these various markets across America. The canals caused price convergence between different regions because of their reduction in transportation costs, which allowed Americans to ship and buy goods from farther distances much cheaper. Ohio built many miles of canal, Indiana had working canals for a few decades, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system until replaced by a channelized river waterway.


title: Canal

text: Three major canals with very different purposes were built in what is now Canada. The first Welland Canal, which opened in 1829 between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, bypassing Niagara Falls and the Lachine Canal (1825), which allowed ships to skirt the nearly impassable rapids on the St. Lawrence River at Montreal, were built for commerce. The Rideau Canal, completed in 1832, connects Ottawa on the Ottawa River to Kingston, Ontario on Lake Ontario. The Rideau Canal was built as a result of the War of 1812 to provide military transportation between the British colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada as an alternative to part of the St. Lawrence River, which was susceptible to blockade by the United States.


title: Canal

text: In France, a steady linking of all the river systems – Rhine, Rhône, Saône and Seine – and the North Sea was boosted in 1879 by the establishment of the Freycinet gauge, which specified the minimum size of locks. Canal traffic doubled in the first decades of the 20th century.


title: Canal

text: Many notable sea canals were completed in this period, starting with the Suez Canal (1869) – which carries tonnage many times that of most other canals – and the Kiel Canal (1897), though the Panama Canal was not opened until 1914.


title: Canal

text: In the 19th century, a number of canals were built in Japan including the Biwako canal and the Tone canal. These canals were partially built with the help of engineers from the Netherlands and other countries.


title: Canal

text: A major question was how to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific with a canal through narrow Central America. (The Panama Railroad opened in 1855.) The original proposal was for a sea-level canal through what is today Nicaragua, taking advantage of the relatively large Lake Nicaragua. This canal has never been built in part because of political instability, which scared off potential investors. It remains an active project (the geography hasn't changed), and in the 2010s Chinese involvement was developing.


title: Canal

text: The second choice for a Central American canal was a Panama canal. The De Lessups company, which ran the Suez Canal, first attempted to build a Panama Canal in the 1880s. The difficulty of the terrain and weather (rain) encountered caused the company to go bankrupt. High worker mortality from disease also discouraged further investment in the project. DeLessup's abandoned excavating equipment sits, isolated decaying machines, today tourist attractions.


title: Canal

text: Twenty years later, an expansionist United States, that just acquired colonies after defeating Spain in the 1898 Spanish–American War, and whose Navy became more important, decided to reactivate the project. The United States and Colombia did not reach agreement on the terms of a canal treaty (see Hay–Herrán Treaty). Panama, which did not have (and still does not have) a land connection with the rest of Colombia, was already thinking of independence. In 1903 the United States, with support from Panamanians who expected the canal to provide substantial wages, revenues, and markets for local goods and services. transform the country, took Panama province away from Colombia, and set up a puppet republic (Panama). Its currency, the Balboa – a name that suggests the country began as a way to get from one hemisphere to the other – was a replica of the US dollar. The US dollar was and remains legal tender (used as currency). A U.S. military zone, the Canal Zone, wide, with U.S. military stationed there (bases, 2 TV stations, channels 8 and 10, Pxs, a U.S.-style high school), split Panama in half. The Canal – a major engineering project – was built. The U.S. did not feel that conditions were stable enough to withdraw until 1979. The withdrawal from Panama contributed to President Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980.


title: Canal

text: Large-scale ship canals such as the Panama Canal and Suez Canal continue to operate for cargo transportation, as do European barge canals. Due to globalization, they are becoming increasingly important, resulting in expansion projects such as the Panama Canal expansion project. The expanded canal began commercial operation on 26 June 2016. The new set of locks allow transit of larger, Post-Panamax and New Panamax ships.


title: Canal

text: The narrow early industrial canals, however, have ceased to carry significant amounts of trade and many have been abandoned to navigation, but may still be used as a system for transportation of untreated water. In some cases railways have been built along the canal route, an example being the Croydon Canal.


title: Canal

text: A movement that began in Britain and France to use the early industrial canals for pleasure boats, such as hotel barges, has spurred rehabilitation of stretches of historic canals. In some cases, abandoned canals such as the Kennet and Avon Canal have been restored and are now used by pleasure boaters. In Britain, canalside housing has also proven popular in recent years.


title: Canal

text: The Seine–Nord Europe Canal is being developed into a major transportation waterway, linking France with Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands.


title: Canal

text: Canals have found another use in the 21st century, as easements for the installation of fibre optic telecommunications network cabling, avoiding having them buried in roadways while facilitating access and reducing the hazard of being damaged from digging equipment.


title: Canal

text: Canals are still used to provide water for agriculture. An extensive canal system exists within the Imperial Valley in the Southern California desert to provide irrigation to agriculture within the area.


title: Canal

text: Canals are so deeply identified with Venice that many canal cities have been nicknamed ""the Venice of…"". The city is built on marshy islands, with wooden piles supporting the buildings, so that the land is man-made rather than the waterways. The islands have a long history of settlement; by the 12th century, Venice was a powerful city state.