title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814. His addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular and humiliating enemas.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In 1809, Coleridge made his second attempt to become a newspaper publisher with the publication of the journal entitled "The Friend". It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge's typically ambitious style, was written, edited, and published almost entirely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be highly disorganised and had no head for business, the publication was probably doomed from the start. Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis and Coleridge was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp", Tom Poole and one or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan to continue. "The Friend" was an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge's remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism. Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times. Years after its initial publication, a revised and expanded edition of "The Friend", with added philosophical content including his 'Essays on the Principles of Method', became a highly influential work and its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Between 1810 and 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on "Hamlet" given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced "Hamlet" studies ever since. Before Coleridge, "Hamlet" was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued the play's reputation, and his thoughts on it are often still published as supplements to the text.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In 1812 he allowed Robert Southey to make use of extracts from his vast number of private notebooks in their collaboration "Omniana; Or, Horae Otiosiores".


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron's publisher, John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic "Faust" (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe's work that purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Between 1814 and 1816, Coleridge rented from a local surgeon, Mr Page, in Calne, Wiltshire. He seemed able to focus on his work and manage his addiction, drafting "Biographia Literaria". A blue plaque marks the property today.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3, The Grove. It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In Gillman's home, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the "Biographia Literaria" (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the "Lay Sermons" of 1816 and 1817, "Sibylline Leaves" (1817), "Hush" (1820), "Aids to Reflection" (1825), and "On the Constitution of the Church and State" (1830). He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as "Essay on Faith" (1838) and "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit" (1840). A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which form his "Opus Maximum", a work which was in part intended as a post-Kantian work of philosophical synthesis. The work was never published in his lifetime, and has frequently been seen as evidence for his tendency to conceive grand projects which he then had difficulty in carrying through to completion. But while he frequently berated himself for his "indolence", the long list of his published works calls this myth into question. Critics are divided on whether the "Opus Maximum", first published in 2002, successfully resolved the philosophical issues he had been exploring for most of his adult life.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being, so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication to being generally, as far as the same is not the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me; in other words a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim ("regula maxima", or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings. "Essay on Faith"


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Carlyle described him at Highgate: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle ... The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of "Magus", girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon."


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge is buried in the aisle of St. Michael's Parish Church in Highgate, London. He was originally buried at Old Highgate Chapel, next to the main entrance of Highgate School, but was re-interred in St. Michael's in 1961. Coleridge could see the red door of the then new church from his last residence across the green, where he lived with a doctor he had hoped might cure him (in a house owned until 2022 by Kate Moss). When it was discovered Coleridge's vault had become derelict, the coffins – Coleridge's and those of his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and grandson – were moved to St. Michael's after an international fundraising appeal.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Drew Clode, a member of St. Michael's stewardship committee states, "they put the coffins in a convenient space which was dry and secure, and quite suitable, bricked them up and forgot about them". A recent excavation revealed the coffins were not in the location most believed, the far corner of the crypt, but actually below a memorial slab in the nave inscribed with: "Beneath this stone lies the body of Samuel Taylor Coleridge".


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: St. Michael's plans to restore the crypt and allow public access. Says vicar Kunle Ayodeji of the plans: "...we hope that the whole crypt can be cleared as a space for meetings and other uses, which would also allow access to Coleridge’s cellar."


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, "The Excursion" or "The Prelude", ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A. O. Lovejoy and I. A. Richards.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge is arguably best known for his longer poems, particularly "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel". Even those who have never read the "Rime" have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (usually rendered as "a sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by "The Rime": "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things both great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all." Millions more who have never read the poem nonetheless know its story thanks to the 1984 song "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden. "Christabel" is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: "Kubla Khan", or, "A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment", although shorter, is also widely known. Both "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" have an additional "Romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing."


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". The term itself was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem" (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well. The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge's finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, "With "Dejection", "The Ancient Mariner", and "Kubla Khan", "Frost at Midnight" shows Coleridge at his most impressive." They are also among his most influential poems, as discussed further below.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Harper himself considered that the eight poems represented a form of blank verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton". In 2006 Robert Koelzer wrote about another aspect of this apparent "easiness", noting that Conversation poems such as "... Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and "The Nightingale" maintain a middle register of speech, employing an idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets itself be taken as 'merely talk' rather than rapturous 'song'."


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: The last ten lines of "Frost at Midnight" were chosen by Harper as the "best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet." The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his side:


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In 1965, M. H. Abrams wrote a broad description that applies to the Conversation poems: "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation." In fact, Abrams was describing both the Conversation poems and later poems influenced by them. Abrams' essay has been called a "touchstone of literary criticism". As Paul Magnuson described it in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called the 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre that began with Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey", Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", and was a major influence on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden."


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including "Biographia Literaria", a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817. The work delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth. Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text and into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical analysis and emotion. However, Eliot also criticises Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are not provoked by the work being studied. Hugh Kenner in "Historical Fictions", discusses Norman Fruman's "Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel" and suggests that the term "criticism" is too often applied to "Biographia Literaria", which both he and Fruman describe as having failed to explain or help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the rational process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking that makes the volume more of a biography than a work of criticism.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In "Biographia Literaria" and his poetry, symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe's books and "The Mad Monk", among others. He comments in his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, – to reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est." and "The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite... We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured."


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: However, Coleridge used these elements in poems such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" (published in 1816, but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like these both drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic romance. Coleridge also made considerable use of Gothic elements in his commercially successful play "Remorse".


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" twice directly in "Frankenstein", and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: C. S. Lewis also makes mention of his name in "The Screwtape Letters" (as a poor example of prayer, in which the devils should encourage).


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Although his father was an Anglican vicar, Coleridge worked as a Unitarian preacher between 1796 and 1797. He eventually returned to the Church of England in 1814. His most noteworthy writings on religion are "Lay Sermons" (1817), "Aids to Reflection" (1825) and "The Constitution of Church and State" (1830).


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Despite being mostly remembered today for his poetry and literary criticism, Coleridge was also (perhaps in his own eyes primarily) a theologian. His writings include discussions of the status of scripture, the doctrines of the Fall, justification and sanctification, and the personality and infinity of God. A major figure in the Anglican theology of his day, his writings are still regularly referred to by contemporary Anglican theologians. F. D. Maurice, F. J. A. Hort, F. W. Robertson, B. F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the "Scottish Coleridge") were all influenced by him.


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: Coleridge was also a political thinker. While he began his life as a political radical, and an enthusiast for the French Revolution, over the years Coleridge developed a more conservative view of society, somewhat in the manner of Edmund Burke. Although seen as cowardly treachery by the next generation of Romantic poets, Coleridge's later thought became a fruitful source for the evolving radicalism of J. S. Mill. Mill found three aspects of Coleridge's thought especially illuminating:


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: The current standard edition is "The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," edited by Kathleen Coburn and many others from 1969 to 2002. This collection appeared across 16 volumes as Bollingen Series 75, published variously by Princeton University Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul. The set is broken down as follows into further parts, resulting in a total of 34 separate printed volumes:


title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

text: In addition, Coleridge's letters are available in: "The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1956–71), ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press).


title: The Falling Man

text: The Falling Man is a photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks in New York City. The unidentified man in the image was trapped on the upper floors of the North Tower, and it is unclear whether he fell while searching for safety or he jumped to escape the fire and smoke. The photograph was taken at exactly 9:41:15 a.m. on the day of the attacks.


title: The Falling Man

text: The photograph was widely criticized after publication in international media on September 12, 2001, with readers labeling the image as "disturbing, cold-blooded, ghoulish, and sadistic". However, in the years following, the photo has gained acclamation.


title: The Falling Man

text: Now regarded as a masterpiece in photojournalism, it is regarded as one of the greatest and most important pieces of art from the 21st century. A "Time Magazine" retrospective published in 2016 stated ""Falling Man’s" identity is still unknown, but he is believed to have been an employee at the Windows on the World restaurant, which sat atop the north tower. The true power of "Falling Man", however, is less about who its subject was and more about what he became: a makeshift Unknown Soldier in an often unknown and uncertain war, suspended forever in history."


title: The Falling Man

text: Of the 2,606 victims killed inside the World Trade Center and on the ground in New York City during the September 11 attacks, some have estimated that at least 200 people fell or jumped to their deaths, while other estimates put the number around 100. Almost all of these individuals came from the North Tower. Officials could not recover or identify the bodies of those forced out of the buildings prior to the collapse of the towers. The New York City medical examiner's office said it does not classify the people who fell to their deaths on September 11 as "jumpers," explaining that a 'jumper' is defined as someone who "goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide," adding that the victims who fell from the towers did not want to die but "were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out."


title: The Falling Man

text: The morning of September 11, Richard Drew was on assignment for the Associated Press, photographing a maternity fashion show in Bryant Park. Alerted by his editor to the attacks, Drew took the subway to the Chambers Street subway station, near the World Trade Center site. He took the falling man image while at the corner of West and Vesey Street from a low angle. He took eight photographs in sequence, after realizing that a series of loud cracking sounds was not that of falling concrete, but rather people hitting the ground. He took between ten and twelve different sequences of images of people jumping from the tower, before having to leave the site due to the South Tower's collapse.


title: The Falling Man

text: The photograph gives the impression that the man is falling straight down; however, a series of photographs taken of his fall shows him to be tumbling through the air.


title: The Falling Man

text: The photograph initially appeared in newspapers around the world, including on page seven of "The New York Times" on September 12, 2001. The photo's caption read, "A person falls headfirst after jumping from the north tower of the World Trade Center. It was a horrific sight that was repeated in the moments after the planes struck the towers." It appeared only once in the "Times" because of criticism and anger against its use. Six years later, it appeared on page 1 of "The New York Times Book Review" on May 27, 2007.


title: The Falling Man

text: The identity of the subject of the photograph has never been officially confirmed. The large number of people trapped in the tower has made identifying the man in the 12 photos difficult.


title: The Falling Man

text: After seeing a missing persons poster, reporter Peter Cheney suggested in the Canadian national newspaper "The Globe and Mail" that the man pictured in the photo may have been Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at Windows on the World, a restaurant located on the 106th floor of the North Tower. Some members of Hernandez's family initially agreed with Cheney, but after examining the entire photo sequence and noting details of his clothing, they were no longer convinced.


title: The Falling Man

text: "The Falling Man", an article about the photograph by American journalist Tom Junod, was published in the September 2003 issue of "Esquire" magazine. It was adapted into a documentary film by the same name. The article gave the possible identity of the falling man as Jonathan Briley, a 33-year-old sound engineer who worked at Windows on the World. Briley had asthma and would have known he was in danger when smoke began to pour into the restaurant. He was initially identified by his brother, Timothy. Michael Lomonaco, the restaurant's executive chef, also suggested that the man was Briley based on his body type and clothes. In one of the photos, the Falling Man's shirt or white jacket was blown open and up, revealing an orange t-shirt similar to one shirt that Briley often wore. Briley's older sister Gwendolyn also suggested that he could be the victim. She told reporters of "The Sunday Mirror", "When I first looked at the picture ... and I saw it was a man—tall, slim—I said, 'If I didn't know any better, that could be Jonathan. Briley's remains were recovered the day after 9/11.


title: The Falling Man

text: "9/11: The Falling Man" is a 2006 documentary film about the photo. It was made by American filmmaker Henry Singer and filmed by Richard Numeroff, a New York-based director of photography. The film is loosely based on Junod's "Esquire" story. It also drew its material from photographer Lyle Owerko's pictures of falling people. It debuted on March 16, 2006, on the British television network Channel 4, later made its North American premiere on Canada's CBC Newsworld on September 6, 2006, and has been broadcast in more than 30 countries. The U.S. premiere was September 10, 2007, on the Discovery Times Channel.


title: The Falling Man

text: The novel "Falling Man", by Don DeLillo, is about the September 11 attacks. The "falling man" in the novel is a performance artist recreating the events of the photograph. DeLillo says he was unfamiliar with the title of the picture when he named his book. The artist straps himself into a harness and jumps from an elevated structure in a high visibility area (such as a highway overpass), hanging in the pose of "The Falling Man".


title: The Falling Man

text: In July 2022, GameStop received controversy for allowing a non-fungible token titled "Falling Man" to be listed on their newly-launched NFT platform. The digital image depicted an astronaut falling in a pose and background replicating Drew's photograph, and was provided the seller's description "This one probably fell from the MIR station", referencing the 1997 crash of "Spektr". The NFT was later delisted from the platform.


title: Asteraceae

text: The family Asteraceae, alternatively Compositae, consists of over 32,000 known species of flowering plants in over 1,900 genera within the order Asterales. Commonly referred to as the aster, daisy, composite, or sunflower family, Compositae were first described in the year 1740. The number of species in Asteraceae is rivaled only by the Orchidaceae, and which is the larger family is unclear as the quantity of extant species in each family is unknown.


title: Asteraceae

text: Most species of Asteraceae are annual, biennial, or perennial herbaceous plants, but there are also shrubs, vines, and trees. The family has a widespread distribution, from subpolar to tropical regions in a wide variety of habitats. Most occur in hot desert and cold or hot semi-desert climates, and they are found on every continent but Antarctica. The primary common characteristic is the existence of sometimes hundreds of tiny individual florets which are held together by protective involucres in flower heads, or more technically, "capitula".


title: Asteraceae

text: The oldest known fossils are pollen grains from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian to Maastrichtian) of Antarctica, dated to million years ago (mya). It is estimated that the crown group of Asteraceae evolved at least 85.9 mya (Late Cretaceous, Santonian) with a stem node age of 88–89 mya (Late Cretaceous, Coniacian).


title: Asteraceae

text: Asteraceae is an economically important family, providing food staples, garden plants, and herbal medicines. Species outside of their native ranges can be considered weedy or invasive.


title: Asteraceae

text: Members of the Asteraceae are mostly herbaceous plants, but some shrubs, vines, and trees (such as "Lachanodes arborea") do exist. Asteraceae species are generally easy to distinguish from other plants because of their unique inflorescence and other shared characteristics, such as the joined anthers of the stamens. However, determining genera and species of some groups such as "Hieracium" is notoriously difficult (see "damned yellow composite" for example).


title: Asteraceae

text: Members of the family Asteraceae generally produce taproots, but sometimes they possess fibrous root systems. Some species have underground stems in the form of caudices or rhizomes. These can be fleshy or woody depending on the species.


title: Asteraceae

text: Stems are herbaceous, aerial, branched, and cylindrical with glandular hairs, generally erect, but can be prostrate to ascending. The stems can contain secretory canals with resin, or latex which is particularly common among the Cichorioideae.


title: Asteraceae

text: Leaves can be alternate, opposite, or whorled. They may be simple, but are often deeply lobed or otherwise incised, often conduplicate or revolute. The margins also can be entire or toothed. Resin or latex also can be present in the leaves.


title: Asteraceae

text: Nearly all Asteraceae bear their flowers in dense flower heads called "capitula". They are surrounded by involucral bracts, and when viewed from a distance, each capitulum may appear to be a single flower. Enlarged outer (peripheral) flowers in the capitulum may resemble petals, and the involucral bracts may look like a calyx.


title: Asteraceae

text: In plants of the family Asteraceae, what appears to be a single flower is actually a cluster of much smaller flowers. The overall appearance of the cluster, as a single flower, functions in attracting pollinators in the same way as the structure of an individual flower in some other plant families. The older family name, Compositae, comes from the fact that what appears to be a single flower is actually a "composite" of smaller flowers.


title: Asteraceae

text: The "petals" or "sunrays" in a sunflower head are actually individual strap-shaped flowers called "ray flowers" or "ray florets", and the "sun disk" is made of smaller circular shaped individual flowers called "disc flowers" or "disk florets". The word "aster" means "star" in Greek, referring to the appearance of some family members, as a star surrounded by rays. The cluster of flowers that may appear to be a single flower is called a "head". The entire head may move tracking the sun, like a "smart" solar panel, which maximizes reflectivity of the whole unit and can thereby attract more pollinators.


title: Asteraceae

text: On the outside the flower heads are small bracts that look like scales. These are called "phyllaries", and together they form the involucre that protects the individual flowers in the head before they open. The individual heads have the smaller individual flowers (florets) arranged on a round or dome-like structure called the "receptacle". The florets mature first at the outside, moving toward the center, with the youngest in the middle.


title: Asteraceae

text: The individual flowers in a head have 5 fused petals (rarely 4), but instead of sepals, they have threadlike, hairy, or bristly structures singularly called a "pappus", plural "pappi", which surround the fruit and can stick to animal fur or be lifted by wind, aiding in seed dispersal. The whitish fluffy head of a dandelion, commonly blown on by children, is made of pappi with tiny seeds attached at the ends. The pappi provide a parachute like structure to help the seed be carried away in the wind.


title: Asteraceae

text: A "ray flower" is a 3-tipped (3-lobed), strap-shaped, individual flower in the head of some members of the family Asteraceae. Sometimes a ray flower is 2-tipped (2-lobed). The corolla of the ray flower may have 2 tiny teeth opposite the 3-lobed strap, or tongue, indicating evolution by fusion from an originally 5-part corolla. Sometimes, the 3:2 arrangement is reversed, with 2 tips on the tongue, and 0 or 3 tiny teeth opposite the tongue. A "ligulate flower" is a 5-tipped, strap-shaped, individual flower in the heads of other members. A "ligule" is the strap-shaped tongue of the corolla of either a ray flower or of a ligulate flower. A "disk flower" (or "disc flower") is a radially symmetric (i.e., with identical shaped petals arranged in circle around the center) individual flower in the head, which is ringed by ray flowers when both are present. Sometimes ray flowers may be slightly off from radial symmetry, or weakly bilaterally symmetric, as in the case of desert pincushions "Chaenactis fremontii".


title: Asteraceae

text: A "radiate head" has disc flowers surrounded by ray flowers. A "ligulate head" has all ligulate flowers. When a sunflower family flower head has only disc flowers that are sterile, male, or have both male and female parts, it is a "discoid head". "Disciform heads" have only disc flowers, but may have two kinds (male flowers and female flowers) in one head, or may have different heads of two kinds (all male, or all female). "Pistillate heads" have all female flowers. "Staminate heads" have all male flowers. Sometimes, but rarely, the head contains only a single flower, or has a single flowered pistillate (female) head, and a multi-flowered male staminate (male) head.


title: Asteraceae

text: The distinguishing characteristic of Asteraceae is their inflorescence, a type of specialised, composite flower head or "pseudanthium", technically called a calathium or "capitulum", that may look superficially like a single flower. The "capitulum" is a contracted raceme composed of numerous individual sessile flowers, called "florets", all sharing the same receptacle.


title: Asteraceae

text: A set of bracts forms an involucre surrounding the base of the capitulum. These are called "phyllaries", or "involucral bracts". They may simulate the sepals of the pseudanthium. These are mostly herbaceous but can also be brightly coloured (e.g. "Helichrysum") or have a scarious (dry and membranous) texture. The phyllaries can be free or fused, and arranged in one to many rows, overlapping like the tiles of a roof ("imbricate") or not (this variation is important in identification of tribes and genera).


title: Asteraceae

text: Each floret may be subtended by a bract, called a "palea" or "receptacular bract". These bracts are often called "chaff". The presence or absence of these bracts, their distribution on the receptacle, and their size and shape are all important diagnostic characteristics for genera and tribes.


title: Asteraceae

text: The florets have five petals fused at the base to form a corolla tube and they may be either actinomorphic or zygomorphic. "Disc florets" are usually actinomorphic, with five petal lips on the rim of the corolla tube. The petal lips may be either very short, or long, in which case they form deeply lobed petals. The latter is the only kind of floret in the Carduoideae, while the first kind is more widespread. "Ray florets" are always highly zygomorphic and are characterised by the presence of a "ligule", a strap-shaped structure on the edge of the corolla tube consisting of fused petals. In the Asteroideae and other minor subfamilies these are usually borne only on florets at the circumference of the capitulum and have a 3+2 scheme – above the fused corolla tube, three very long fused petals form the ligule, with the other two petals being inconspicuously small. The Cichorioideae has only ray florets, with a 5+0 scheme – all five petals form the ligule. A 4+1 scheme is found in the Barnadesioideae. The tip of the ligule is often divided into teeth, each one representing a petal. Some marginal florets may have no petals at all (filiform floret).


title: Asteraceae

text: The calyx of the florets may be absent, but when present is always modified into a pappus of two or more teeth, scales or bristles and this is often involved in the dispersion of the seeds. As with the bracts, the nature of the pappus is an important diagnostic feature.


title: Asteraceae

text: There are usually four or five stamens. The filaments are fused to the corolla, while the anthers are generally connate ("syngenesious" anthers), thus forming a sort of tube around the style ("theca"). They commonly have basal and/or apical appendages. Pollen is released inside the tube and is collected around the growing style, and then, as the style elongates, is pushed out of the tube ("nüdelspritze").


title: Asteraceae

text: The pistil consists of two connate carpels. The style has two lobes. Stigmatic tissue may be located in the interior surface or form two lateral lines. The ovary is inferior and has only one ovule, with basal placentation.


title: Asteraceae

text: In members of the Asteraceae the fruit is achene-like, and is called a "cypsela" (plural "cypselae"). Although there are two fused carpels, there is only one locule, and only one seed per fruit is formed. It may sometimes be winged or spiny because the pappus, which is derived from calyx tissue often remains on the fruit (for example in dandelion). In some species, however, the pappus falls off (for example in "Helianthus"). Cypsela morphology is often used to help determine plant relationships at the genus and species level. The mature seeds usually have little endosperm or none.


title: Asteraceae

text: The pollen of composites is typically echinolophate, a morphological term meaning "with elaborate systems of ridges and spines dispersed around and between the apertures."


title: Asteraceae

text: In Asteraceae, the energy store is generally in the form of inulin rather than starch. They produce iso/chlorogenic acid, sesquiterpene lactones, pentacyclic triterpene alcohols, various alkaloids, acetylenes (cyclic, aromatic, with vinyl end groups), tannins. They have terpenoid essential oils which never contain iridoids.


title: Asteraceae

text: Asteraceae produce secondary metabolites, such as flavonoids and terpenoids. Some of these molecules can inhibit protozoan parasites such as "Plasmodium", "Trypanosoma", "Leishmania" and parasitic intestinal worms, and thus have potential in medicine.


title: Asteraceae

text: Compositae, the original name for Asteraceae, were first described in 1740 by Dutch botanist Adriaan van Royen. Traditionally, two subfamilies were recognised: Asteroideae (or Tubuliflorae) and Cichorioideae (or Liguliflorae). The latter has been shown to be extensively paraphyletic, and has now been divided into 12 subfamilies, but the former still stands. The study of this family is known as synantherology.


title: Asteraceae

text: The phylogenetic tree presented below is based on Panero & Funk (2002) updated in 2014, and now also includes the monotypic Famatinanthoideae.


title: Asteraceae

text: The diamond (♦) denotes a very poorly supported node (<50% bootstrap support), the dot (•) a poorly supported node (<80%).


title: Asteraceae

text: The family includes over 32,000 currently accepted species, in over 1,900 genera (list) in 13 subfamilies. The number of species in the family Asteraceae is rivaled only by Orchidaceae. Which is the larger family is unclear, because of the uncertainty about how many extant species each family includes. The four subfamilies Asteroideae, Cichorioideae, Carduoideae and Mutisioideae contain 99% of the species diversity of the whole family (approximately 70%, 14%, 11% and 3% respectively).


title: Asteraceae

text: Because of the morphological complexity exhibited by this family, agreeing on generic circumscriptions has often been difficult for taxonomists. As a result, several of these genera have required multiple revisions.


title: Asteraceae

text: The oldest known fossils of members of Asteraceae are pollen grains from the Late Cretaceous of Antarctica, dated to ∼76–66 mya (Campanian to Maastrichtian) and assigned to the extant genus "Dasyphyllum". Barreda, "et al." (2015) estimated that the crown group of Asteraceae evolved at least 85.9 mya (Late Cretaceous, Santonian) with a stem node age of 88–89 mya (Late Cretaceous, Coniacian).


title: Asteraceae

text: It is not known whether the precise cause of their great success was the development of the highly specialised capitulum, their ability to store energy as fructans (mainly inulin), which is an advantage in relatively dry zones, or some combination of these and possibly other factors. Heterocarpy, or the ability to produce different fruit morphs, has evolved and is common in Asteraceae. It allows seeds to be dispersed over varying distances and each is adapted to different environments, increasing chances of survival.


title: Asteraceae

text: The name Asteraceae () comes to international scientific vocabulary from New Latin, from "Aster", the type genus, + "-aceae", a standardized suffix for plant family names in modern taxonomy. The genus name comes from the Classical Latin word , "star", which came from Ancient Greek (), "star". It refers to the star-like form of the inflorescence.


title: Asteraceae

text: The original name Compositae is still valid under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. It refers to the "composite" nature of the capitula, which consist of a few or many individual flowers.


title: Asteraceae

text: The vernacular name "daisy", widely applied to members of this family, is derived from the Old English name of the daisy ("Bellis perennis"): , meaning "day's eye". This is because the petals open at dawn and close at dusk.


title: Asteraceae

text: Asteraceae species have a widespread distribution, from subpolar to tropical regions in a wide variety of habitats. Most occur in hot desert and cold or hot semi-desert climates, and they are found on every continent but Antarctica. They are especially numerous in tropical and subtropical regions (notably Central America, eastern Brazil, the Mediterranean, the Levant, southern Africa, central Asia, and southwestern China). The largest proportion of the species occur in the arid and semi-arid regions of subtropical and lower temperate latitudes. The Asteraceae family comprises 10% of all flowering plant species.


title: Asteraceae

text: Asteraceae are especially common in open and dry environments. Many members of Asteraceae are pollinated by insects, which explains their value in attracting beneficial insects, but anemophily is also present (e.g. "Ambrosia", "Artemisia"). There are many apomictic species in the family.


title: Asteraceae

text: Seeds are ordinarily dispersed intact with the fruiting body, the cypsela. "Anemochory" (wind dispersal) is common, assisted by a hairy pappus. "Epizoochory" is another common method, in which the dispersal unit, a single cypsela (e.g. "Bidens") or entire capitulum (e.g. "Arctium") has hooks, spines or some structure to attach to the fur or plumage (or even clothes, as in the photo) of an animal just to fall off later far from its mother plant.


title: Asteraceae

text: Some members of Asteraceae are economically important as weeds. Notable in the United States are "Senecio jacobaea" (ragwort), "Senecio vulgaris" (groundsel), and "Taraxacum" (dandelion). Some are invasive species in particular regions, often having been introduced by human agency. Examples include various tumbleweeds, "Bidens", ragweeds, thistles, and dandelion. Dandelion was introduced into North America by European settlers who used the young leaves as a salad green. A number of species are toxic to grazing animals.


title: Asteraceae

text: Asteraceae is an economically important family, providing products such as cooking oils, leaf vegetables like lettuce, sunflower seeds, artichokes, sweetening agents, coffee substitutes and herbal teas. Several genera are of horticultural importance, including pot marigold ("Calendula officinalis"), "Echinacea" (coneflowers), various daisies, fleabane, chrysanthemums, dahlias, zinnias, and heleniums. Asteraceae are important in herbal medicine, including "Grindelia", yarrow, and many others.


title: Asteraceae

text: Commercially important plants in Asteraceae include the food crops "Lactuca sativa" (lettuce), "Cichorium" (chicory), "Cynara scolymus" (globe artichoke), "Helianthus annuus" (sunflower), "Smallanthus sonchifolius" (yacón), "Carthamus tinctorius" (safflower) and "Helianthus tuberosus" (Jerusalem artichoke).


title: Asteraceae

text: Plants are used as herbs and in herbal teas and other beverages. Chamomile, for example, comes from two different species: the annual "Matricaria chamomilla" (German chamomile) and the perennial "Chamaemelum nobile" (Roman chamomile). "Calendula" (known as pot marigold) is grown commercially for herbal teas and potpourri. "Echinacea" is used as a medicinal tea. The wormwood genus "Artemisia" includes absinthe ("A. absinthium") and tarragon ("A. dracunculus"). Winter tarragon ("Tagetes lucida"), is commonly grown and used as a tarragon substitute in climates where tarragon will not survive.


title: Asteraceae

text: Many members of the family are grown as ornamental plants for their flowers, and some are important ornamental crops for the cut flower industry. Some examples are "Chrysanthemum", "Gerbera", "Calendula", "Dendranthema", "Argyranthemum", "Dahlia", "Tagetes", "Zinnia", and many others.


title: Asteraceae

text: Many species of this family possess medicinal properties and are used as traditional antiparasitic medicine.


title: Asteraceae

text: Members of the family are also commonly featured in medical and phytochemical journals because the sesquiterpene lactone compounds contained within them are an important cause of allergic contact dermatitis. Allergy to these compounds is the leading cause of allergic contact dermatitis in florists in the US. Pollen from ragweed "Ambrosia" is among the main causes of so-called hay fever in the United States.


title: Asteraceae

text: Asteraceae are also used for some industrial purposes. French Marigold ("Tagetes patula") is common in commercial poultry feeds and its oil is extracted for uses in cola and the cigarette industry. The genera "Chrysanthemum", "Pulicaria", "Tagetes", and "Tanacetum" contain species with useful insecticidal properties. "Parthenium argentatum" (guayule) is a source of hypoallergenic latex.


title: Asteraceae

text: Several members of the family are copious nectar producers and are useful for evaluating pollinator populations during their bloom. "Centaurea" (knapweed), "Helianthus annuus" (domestic sunflower), and some species of "Solidago" (goldenrod) are major "honey plants" for beekeepers. "Solidago" produces relatively high protein pollen, which helps honey bees over winter.


title: Wind turbine

text: A wind turbine is a device that converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. Hundreds of thousands of large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, now generate over 650 gigawatts of power, with 60 GW added each year. Wind turbines are an increasingly important source of intermittent renewable energy, and are used in many countries to lower energy costs and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. One study claimed that, wind had the "lowest relative greenhouse gas emissions, the least water consumption demands and the most favorable social impacts" compared to photovoltaic, hydro, geothermal, coal and gas energy sources.


title: Wind turbine

text: Smaller wind turbines are used for applications such as battery charging for auxiliary power for boats or caravans, and to power traffic warning signs. Larger turbines can contribute to a domestic power supply while selling unused power back to the utility supplier via the electrical grid.


title: Wind turbine

text: The windwheel of Hero of Alexandria (10 AD – 70 CE) marks one of the first recorded instances of wind powering a machine. However, the first known practical wind power plants were built in Sistan, an Eastern province of Persia (now Iran), from the 7th century. These "Panemone" were vertical axle windmills, which had long vertical drive shafts with rectangular blades. Made of six to twelve sails covered in reed matting or cloth material, these windmills were used to grind grain or draw up water, and were used in the gristmilling and sugarcane industries.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind power first appeared in Europe during the Middle Ages. The first historical records of their use in England date to the 11th and 12th centuries; there are reports of German crusaders taking their windmill-making skills to Syria around 1190. By the 14th century, Dutch windmills were in use to drain areas of the Rhine delta. Advanced wind turbines were described by Croatian inventor Fausto Veranzio in his book "Machinae Novae" (1595), he described vertical axis wind turbines with curved or V-shaped blades.


title: Wind turbine

text: The first electricity-generating wind turbine was a battery-charging machine installed in July 1887 by Scottish academic James Blyth to light his holiday home in Marykirk, Scotland. Some months later, American inventor Charles F. Brush was able to build the first automatically operated wind turbine after consulting local University professors and his colleagues Jacob S. Gibbs and Brinsley Coleberd and successfully getting the blueprints peer-reviewed for electricity production. Although Blyth's turbine was considered uneconomical in the United Kingdom, electricity generation by wind turbines was more cost effective in countries with widely scattered populations.


title: Wind turbine

text: In Denmark by 1900, there were about 2500 windmills for mechanical loads such as pumps and mills, producing an estimated combined peak power of about 30 megawatts (MW). The largest machines were on towers with four-bladed diameter rotors. By 1908, there were 72 wind-driven electric generators operating in the United States from 5 kilowatts (kW) to 25 kW. Around the time of World War I, American windmill makers were producing 100,000 farm windmills each year, mostly for water-pumping.


title: Wind turbine

text: By the 1930s, wind generators for electricity were common on farms, mostly in the United States where distribution systems had not yet been installed.


title: Wind turbine

text: A forerunner of modern horizontal-axis wind generators was in service at Yalta, USSR in 1931. This was a 100 kW generator on a tower, connected to the local 6.3 kV distribution system. It was reported to have an annual capacity factor of 32 percent, not much different from current wind machines.


title: Wind turbine

text: In the autumn of 1941, the first megawatt-class wind turbine was synchronized to a utility grid in Vermont. The Smith–Putnam wind turbine only ran for 1,100 hours before suffering a critical failure. The unit was not repaired, because of a shortage of materials during the war.


title: Wind turbine

text: The first utility grid-connected wind turbine to operate in the UK was built by John Brown & Company in 1951 in the Orkney Islands.


title: Wind turbine

text: Despite these diverse developments, developments in fossil fuel systems almost entirely eliminated any wind turbine systems larger than supermicro size. In the early 1970s, however, anti-nuclear protests in Denmark spurred artisan mechanics to develop microturbines of 22 kW. Organizing owners into associations and co-operatives led to the lobbying of the government and utilities and provided incentives for larger turbines throughout the 1980s and later. Local activists in Germany, nascent turbine manufacturers in Spain, and large investors in the United States in the early 1990s then lobbied for policies that stimulated the industry in those countries.


title: Wind turbine

text: It has been argued that expanding use of wind power will lead to increasing geopolitical competition over critical materials for wind turbines such as rare earth elements neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. However, this perspective has been criticised for failing to recognise that most wind turbines do not use permanent magnets and for underestimating the power of economic incentives for expanded production of these minerals.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind Power Density (WPD) is a quantitative measure of wind energy available at any location. It is the mean annual power available per square meter of swept area of a turbine, and is calculated for different heights above ground. Calculation of wind power density includes the effect of wind velocity and air density.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines are classified by the wind speed they are designed for, from class I to class III, with A to C referring to the turbulence intensity of the wind.


title: Wind turbine

text: Conservation of mass requires that the amount of air entering and exiting a turbine must be equal. Accordingly, Betz's law gives the maximal achievable extraction of wind power by a wind turbine as (59.3%) of the rate at which the kinetic energy of the air arrives at the turbine.


title: Wind turbine

text: The maximum theoretical power output of a wind machine is thus times the rate at which kinetic energy of the air arrives at the effective disk area of the machine. If the effective area of the disk is A, and the wind velocity v, the maximum theoretical power output P is:


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind-to-rotor efficiency (including rotor blade friction and drag) are among the factors affecting the final price of wind power.


title: Wind turbine

text: Further inefficiencies, such as gearbox losses, generator and converter losses, reduce the power delivered by a wind turbine. To protect components from undue wear, extracted power is held constant above the rated operating speed as theoretical power increases at the cube of wind speed, further reducing theoretical efficiency. In 2001, commercial utility-connected turbines delivered 75% to 80% of the Betz limit of power extractable from the wind, at rated operating speed.


title: Wind turbine

text: Efficiency can decrease slightly over time, one of the main reasons being dust and insect carcasses on the blades which alters the aerodynamic profile and essentially reduces the lift to drag ratio of the airfoil. Analysis of 3128 wind turbines older than 10 years in Denmark showed that half of the turbines had no decrease, while the other half saw a production decrease of 1.2% per year.


title: Wind turbine

text: In general, more stable and constant weather conditions (most notably wind speed) result in an average of 15% greater efficiency than that of a wind turbine in unstable weather conditions, thus allowing up to a 7% increase in wind speed under stable conditions. This is due to a faster recovery wake and greater flow entrainment that occur in conditions of higher atmospheric stability. However, wind turbine wakes have been found to recover faster under unstable atmospheric conditions as opposed to a stable environment.


title: Wind turbine

text: Different materials have been found to have varying effects on the efficiency of wind turbines. In an Ege University experiment, three wind turbines (Each with three blades with diameters of one meter) were constructed with blades made of different materials: A glass and glass/carbon epoxy, glass/carbon, and glass/polyester. When tested, the results showed that the materials with higher overall masses had a greater friction moment and thus a lower power coefficient.


title: Wind turbine

text: The air velocity is the major contributor for the turbine efficiency. This is the reason for the importance of choosing the right location. The wind velocity will be high near the shore because of the temperature difference between the land and the ocean, another option is to put it on mountain ridges. The higher the wind turbine will be, the wind velocity will be higher in average. Windbreak can also increase the wind velocity near the turbine.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines can rotate about either a horizontal or a vertical axis, the former being both older and more common. They can also include blades or be bladeless. Household-size vertical designs produce less power and are less common.


title: Wind turbine

text: Large three-bladed horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWT) with the blades upwind of the tower produce the overwhelming majority of wind power in the world today. These turbines have the main rotor shaft and electrical generator at the top of a tower, and must be pointed into the wind. Small turbines are pointed by a simple wind vane, while large turbines generally use a wind sensor coupled with a yaw system. Most have a gearbox, which turns the slow rotation of the blades into a quicker rotation that is more suitable to drive an electrical generator. Some turbines use a different type of generator suited to slower rotational speed input. These don't need a gearbox and are called direct-drive, meaning they couple the rotor directly to the generator with no gearbox in between. While permanent magnet direct-drive generators can be more costly due to the rare earth materials required, these gearless turbines are sometimes preferred over gearbox generators because they "eliminate the gear-speed increaser, which is susceptible to significant accumulated fatigue torque loading, related reliability issues, and maintenance costs." There is also the pseudo direct drive mechanism, which has some advantages over the permanent magnet direct drive mechanism.


title: Wind turbine

text: Most horizontal axis turbines have their rotors upwind of the supporting tower. Downwind machines have been built, because they don't need an additional mechanism for keeping them in line with the wind. In high winds, the blades can also be allowed to bend, which reduces their swept area and thus their wind resistance. Despite these advantages, upwind designs are preferred, because the change in loading from the wind as each blade passes behind the supporting tower can cause damage to the turbine.


title: Wind turbine

text: Turbines used in wind farms for commercial production of electric power are usually three-bladed. These have low torque ripple, which contributes to good reliability. The blades are usually colored white for daytime visibility by aircraft and range in length from . The size and height of turbines increase year by year. Offshore wind turbines are built up to 8 MW today and have a blade length up to . Designs with 10 to 12 MW were in preparation in 2018, and a "15 MW+" prototype with three blades is planned to be constructed in 2022. Usual multi megawatt turbines have tubular steel towers with a height of 70m to 120m and in extremes up to 160m.


title: Wind turbine

text: Vertical-axis wind turbines (or VAWTs) have the main rotor shaft arranged vertically. One advantage of this arrangement is that the turbine does not need to be pointed into the wind to be effective, which is an advantage on a site where the wind direction is highly variable. It is also an advantage when the turbine is integrated into a building because it is inherently less steerable. Also, the generator and gearbox can be placed near the ground, using a direct drive from the rotor assembly to the ground-based gearbox, improving accessibility for maintenance. However, these designs produce much less energy averaged over time, which is a major drawback.


title: Wind turbine

text: Vertical turbine designs have much lower efficiency than standard horizontal designs. The key disadvantages include the relatively low rotational speed with the consequential higher torque and hence higher cost of the drive train, the inherently lower power coefficient, the 360-degree rotation of the aerofoil within the wind flow during each cycle and hence the highly dynamic loading on the blade, the pulsating torque generated by some rotor designs on the drive train, and the difficulty of modelling the wind flow accurately and hence the challenges of analysing and designing the rotor prior to fabricating a prototype.


title: Wind turbine

text: When a turbine is mounted on a rooftop the building generally redirects wind over the roof and this can double the wind speed at the turbine. If the height of a rooftop mounted turbine tower is approximately 50% of the building height it is near the optimum for maximum wind energy and minimum wind turbulence. While wind speeds within the built environment are generally much lower than at exposed rural sites, noise may be a concern and an existing structure may not adequately resist the additional stress.


title: Wind turbine

text: "Eggbeater" turbines, or Darrieus turbines, were named after the French inventor, Georges Darrieus. They have good efficiency, but produce large torque ripple and cyclical stress on the tower, which contributes to poor reliability. They also generally require some external power source, or an additional Savonius rotor to start turning, because the starting torque is very low. The torque ripple is reduced by using three or more blades, which results in greater solidity of the rotor. Solidity is measured by blade area divided by the rotor area. Newer Darrieus type turbines are not held up by guy-wires but have an external superstructure connected to the top bearing.


title: Wind turbine

text: A subtype of Darrieus turbine with straight, as opposed to curved, blades. The cycloturbine variety has variable pitch to reduce the torque pulsation and is self-starting. The advantages of variable pitch are: high starting torque; a wide, relatively flat torque curve; a higher coefficient of performance; more efficient operation in turbulent winds; and a lower blade speed ratio which lowers blade bending stresses. Straight, V, or curved blades may be used.


title: Wind turbine

text: These are drag-type devices with two (or more) scoops that are used in anemometers, "Flettner" vents (commonly seen on bus and van roofs), and in some high-reliability low-efficiency power turbines. They are always self-starting if there are at least three scoops.


title: Wind turbine

text: Twisted Savonius is a modified savonius, with long helical scoops to provide smooth torque. This is often used as a rooftop wind turbine and has even been adapted for ships.


title: Wind turbine

text: The parallel turbine is similar to the crossflow fan or centrifugal fan. It uses the ground effect. Vertical axis turbines of this type have been tried for many years: a unit producing 10 kW was built by Israeli wind pioneer Bruce Brill in the 1980s.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines convert wind energy to electrical energy for distribution. Conventional horizontal axis turbines can be divided into three components:


title: Wind turbine

text: A 1.5 (MW) wind turbine of a type frequently seen in the United States has a tower high. The rotor assembly (blades and hub) weighs . The nacelle, which contains the generator, weighs . The concrete base for the tower is constructed using reinforcing steel and contains of concrete. The base is in diameter and thick near the center.


title: Wind turbine

text: Due to data transmission problems, structural health monitoring of wind turbines is usually performed using several accelerometers and strain gages attached to the nacelle to monitor the gearbox and equipment. Currently, digital image correlation and stereophotogrammetry are used to measure dynamics of wind turbine blades. These methods usually measure displacement and strain to identify location of defects. Dynamic characteristics of non-rotating wind turbines have been measured using digital image correlation and photogrammetry. Three dimensional point tracking has also been used to measure rotating dynamics of wind turbines.


title: Wind turbine

text: Generally, efficiency increases along with turbine blade lengths. The blades must be stiff, strong, durable, light and resistant to fatigue. Materials with these properties include composites such as polyester and epoxy, while glass fiber and carbon fiber have been used for the reinforcing. Construction may involve manual layup or injection molding. Retrofitting existing turbines with larger blades reduces the task and risks of redesign.


title: Wind turbine

text: As of 2021, the longest blade was , producing 15 MW with a maximum noise level of 118 dB(A). Blades need to function over a 100 million load cycles over a period of 20–25 years.


title: Wind turbine

text: The stiffness of composites is determined by the stiffness of fibers and their volume content. Typically, E-glass fibers are used as main reinforcement in the composites. Typically, the glass/epoxy composites for wind turbine blades contain up to 75% glass by weight. This increases the stiffness, tensile and compression strength. A promising composite material is glass fiber with modified compositions like S-glass, R-glass etc. Other glass fibers developed by Owens Corning are ECRGLAS, Advantex and WindStrand.


title: Wind turbine

text: Carbon fiber has more tensile strength, higher stiffness and lower density than glass fiber. An ideal candidate for these properties is the spar cap, a structural element of a blade which experiences high tensile loading. A glass fiber blade could weigh up to , while using carbon fiber in the spar saves 20% to 30% weight, about . However, because carbon fiber is ten times more expensive, glass fiber is still dominant.


title: Wind turbine

text: Instead of making wind turbine blade reinforcements from pure glass or pure carbon, hybrid designs trade weight for cost. For example, for an blade, a full replacement by carbon fiber would save 80% of weight but increase costs by 150%, while a 30% replacement would save 50% of weight and increase costs by 90%. Hybrid reinforcement materials include E-glass/carbon, E-glass/aramid. The current longest blade by LM Wind Power is made of carbon/glass hybrid composites. More research is needed about the optimal composition of materials


title: Wind turbine

text: Additions of small amount (0.5 weight %) of nanoreinforcement (carbon nanotubes or nanoclay) in the polymer matrix of composites, fiber sizing or interlaminar layers can improve fatigue resistance, shear or compressive strength, and fracture toughness of the composites by 30% to 80%. Research has also shown that incorporating small amounts of carbon nanotubes (CNT) can increase the lifetime up to 1500%.


title: Wind turbine

text: , the capital cost of a wind turbine was around $1 million per megawatt of nameplate capacity, though this figure varies by location; from a half million in South America to $1.7 million in Asia.


title: Wind turbine

text: For the wind turbine blades, while the material cost is much higher for hybrid glass/carbon fiber blades than all-glass fiber blades, labor costs can be lower. Using carbon fiber allows simpler designs that use less raw material. The chief manufacturing process in blade fabrication is the layering of plies. Thinner blades allow reducing the number of layers and so the labor, and in some cases, equate to the cost of labor for glass fiber blades.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbine parts other than the rotor blades (including the rotor hub, gearbox, frame, and tower) are largely made of steel. Smaller turbines (as well as megawatt-scale Enercon turbines) have begun using aluminum alloys for these components to make turbines lighter and more efficient. This trend may grow if fatigue and strength properties can be improved.


title: Wind turbine

text: Pre-stressed concrete has been increasingly used for the material of the tower, but still requires much reinforcing steel to meet the strength requirement of the turbine. Additionally, step-up gearboxes are being increasingly replaced with variable speed generators, which requires magnetic materials. In particular, this would require a greater supply of the rare earth metal neodymium.


title: Wind turbine

text: Modern turbines use a couple of tons of copper for generators, cables and such. , global production of wind turbines use of copper per year.


title: Wind turbine

text: A study of the material consumption trends and requirements for wind energy in Europe found that bigger turbines have a higher consumption of precious metals but lower material input per kW generated. The current material consumption and stock was compared to input materials for various onshore system sizes. In all EU countries the estimates for 2020 doubled the values consumed in 2009. These countries would need to expand their resources to meet the estimated demand for 2020. For example, currently the EU has 3% of world supply of fluorspar and it requires 14% by 2020. Globally, the main exporting countries are South Africa, Mexico and China. This is similar with other critical and valuable materials required for energy systems such as magnesium, silver and indium. The levels of recycling of these materials are very low and focusing on that could alleviate supply. Because most of these valuable materials are also used in other emerging technologies, like light emitting diodes (LEDs), photo voltaics (PVs) and liquid crystal displays (LCDs), their demand is expected to grow.


title: Wind turbine

text: A study by the United States Geological Survey estimated resources required to fulfill the US commitment to supplying 20% of its electricity from wind power by 2030. It did not consider requirements for small turbines or offshore turbines because those were not common in 2008 when the study was done. Common materials such as cast iron, steel and concrete would increase by 2%–3% compared to 2008. Between 110,000 and 115,000 metric tons of fiber glass would be required per year, a 14% increase. Rare metal use would not increase much compared to available supply, however rare metals that are also used for other technologies such as batteries which are increasing its global demand need to be taken into account. Land required would be 50,000 square kilometers onshore and 11,000 offshore. This would not be a problem in the US due to its vast area and because the same land can be used for farming. A greater challenge would be the variability and transmission to areas of high demand.


title: Wind turbine

text: Permanent magnets for wind turbine generators contain rare metals such as neodymium (Nd), praseodymium (Pr), Terbium (Tb) and dysprosium (Dy). Systems that use magnetic direct drive turbines require greater amounts of rare metals. Therefore, an increase in wind turbine manufacture would increase the demand for these resources. By 2035, the demand for Nd is estimated to increase by 4,000 to 18,000 tons and for Dy by 200 to 1200 tons. These values are a quarter to half of current production. However, these estimates are very uncertain because technologies are developing rapidly.


title: Wind turbine

text: Reliance on rare earth minerals for components has risked expense and price volatility as China has been main producer of rare earth minerals (96% in 2009) and was reducing its export quotas. However, in recent years other producers have increased production and China has increased export quotas, leading to a higher supply and lower cost, and a greater viability of large scale use of variable-speed generators.


title: Wind turbine

text: Glass fiber is the most common material for reinforcement. Its demand has grown due to growth in construction, transportation and wind turbines. Its global market might reach US$17.4 billion by 2024, compared to US$8.5 billion in 2014. In 2014, Asia Pacific produced more than 45% of the market; now China is the largest producer. The industry receives subsidies from the Chinese government allowing it to export cheaper to the US and Europe. However, price wars have led to anti-dumping measures such as tariffs on Chinese glass fiber.


title: Wind turbine

text: A few localities have exploited the attention-getting nature of wind turbines by placing them on public display, either with visitor centers around their bases, or with viewing areas farther away. The wind turbines are generally of conventional horizontal-axis, three-bladed design, and generate power to feed electrical grids, but they also serve the unconventional roles of technology demonstration, public relations, and education.


title: Wind turbine

text: Small wind turbines may be used for a variety of applications including on- or off-grid residences, telecom towers, offshore platforms, rural schools and clinics, remote monitoring and other purposes that require energy where there is no electric grid, or where the grid is unstable. Small wind turbines may be as small as a fifty-watt generator for boat or caravan use. Hybrid solar and wind powered units are increasingly being used for traffic signage, particularly in rural locations, as they avoid the need to lay long cables from the nearest mains connection point. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) defines small wind turbines as those smaller than or equal to 100 kilowatts. Small units often have direct drive generators, direct current output, aeroelastic blades, lifetime bearings and use a vane to point into the wind.


title: Wind turbine

text: Larger, more costly turbines generally have geared power trains, alternating current output, and flaps, and are actively pointed into the wind. Direct drive generators and aeroelastic blades for large wind turbines are being researched.


title: Wind turbine

text: On most horizontal wind turbine farms, a spacing of about 6–10 times the rotor diameter is often upheld. However, for large wind farms distances of about 15 rotor diameters should be more economical, taking into account typical wind turbine and land costs. This conclusion has been reached by research conducted by Charles Meneveau of Johns Hopkins University and Johan Meyers of Leuven University in Belgium, based on computer simulations that take into account the detailed interactions among wind turbines (wakes) as well as with the entire turbulent atmospheric boundary layer.


title: Wind turbine

text: Recent research by John Dabiri of Caltech suggests that vertical wind turbines may be placed much more closely together so long as an alternating pattern of rotation is created allowing blades of neighbouring turbines to move in the same direction as they approach one another.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines need regular maintenance to stay reliable and available. In the best case turbines are available to generate energy 98% of the time. Ice accretion on turbine blades has also been found to greatly reduce the efficiency of wind turbines, which is a common challenge in cold climates where in-cloud icing and freezing rain events occur. De-icing is mainly performed by internal heating, or in some cases by helicopters spraying clean warm water on the blades.


title: Wind turbine

text: Modern turbines usually have a small onboard crane for hoisting maintenance tools and minor components. However, large, heavy components like generator, gearbox, blades, and so on are rarely replaced, and a heavy lift external crane is needed in those cases. If the turbine has a difficult access road, a containerized crane can be lifted up by the internal crane to provide heavier lifting.


title: Wind turbine

text: Installation of new wind turbines can be controversial. An alternative is repowering, where existing wind turbines are replaced with bigger, more powerful ones, sometimes in smaller numbers while keeping or increasing capacity.


title: Wind turbine

text: Some wind turbines which are out of use are recycled or repowered. 85% of turbine materials are easily reused or recycled, but the blades, made of a composite material, are more difficult to process.


title: Wind turbine

text: Interest in recycling blades varies in different markets and depends on the waste legislation and local economics. A challenge in recycling blades is related to the composite material, which is made of fiberglass with carbon fibers in epoxy resin, which cannot be remolded to form new composites. So the options are to send the blade to landfill, to reuse the blade and the composite material elements found in the blade, or to transform the composite material into a new source of material.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind farm waste is less toxic than other garbage. Wind turbine blades represent only a fraction of overall waste in the US, according to the Wind-industry trade association, American Wind Energy Association. In the US the town of Casper, Wyoming has buried 1,000 non-recyclable blades in its landfill site, earning $675,000 for the town.


title: Wind turbine

text: Several utilities, start-up companies, and researchers are developing methods for reusing or recycling blades. Manufacturer Vestas has developed technology that can separate the fibers from the resin, allowing for reuse. In Germany, wind turbine blades are commercially recycled as part of an alternative fuel mix for a cement factory. In the United Kingdom, a project will trial cutting blades into strips for use as rebar in concrete, with the aim of reducing emissions in the construction of High Speed 2. Used wind turbine blades have been recycled by incorporating them as part of the support structures within pedestrian bridges in Poland and Ireland.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines produce electricity at between two and six cents per kilowatt hour, which is one of the lowest-priced renewable energy sources. As technology needed for wind turbines continued to improve, the prices decreased as well. In addition, there is currently no competitive market for wind energy, because wind is a freely available natural resource, most of which is untapped. The main cost of small wind turbines is the purchase and installation process, which averages between $48,000 and $65,000 per installation. The energy harvested from the turbine will offset the installation cost, as well as provide virtually free energy for years.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines provide a clean energy source, use little water, emitting no greenhouse gases and no waste products during operation. Over of carbon dioxide per year can be eliminated by using a one-megawatt turbine instead of one megawatt of energy from a fossil fuel.


title: Wind turbine

text: Wind turbines can be very large, reaching over tall and with blades long, and people have often complained about their visual impact.


title: Wind turbine

text: Environmental impact of wind power includes effect on wildlife, but can be mitigated if proper monitoring and mitigation strategies are implemented. Thousands of birds, including rare species, have been killed by the blades of wind turbines, though wind turbines contribute relatively insignificantly to anthropogenic avian mortality. Wind farms and nuclear power plants are responsible for between 0.3 and 0.4 bird deaths per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil fueled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh. In 2009, for every bird killed by a wind turbine in the US, nearly 500,000 were killed by cats and another 500,000 by buildings. In comparison, conventional coal fired generators contribute significantly more to bird mortality, by incineration when caught in updrafts of smoke stacks and by poisoning with emissions byproducts (including particulates and heavy metals downwind of flue gases). Further, marine life is affected by water intakes of steam turbine cooling towers (heat exchangers) for nuclear and fossil fuel generators, by coal dust deposits in marine ecosystems (e.g. damaging Australia's Great Barrier Reef) and by water acidification from combustion monoxides.


title: Wind turbine

text: Energy harnessed by wind turbines is variable, and is not a "dispatchable" source of power; its availability is based on whether the wind is blowing, not whether electricity is needed. Turbines can be placed on ridges or bluffs to maximize the access of wind they have, but this also limits the locations where they can be placed. In this way, wind energy is not a particularly reliable source of energy. However, it can form part of the energy mix, which also includes power from other sources. Notably, the relative available output from wind and solar sources is often inversely proportional (balancing). Technology is also being developed to store excess energy, which can then make up for any deficits in supplies.


title: Aesop

text: Aesop ( or ; , ; c. 620–564 BCE) was a Greek fabulist and storyteller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as "Aesop's Fables". Although his existence remains unclear and no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. Many of the tales associated with him are characterized by anthropomorphic animal characters.


title: Aesop

text: Scattered details of Aesop's life can be found in ancient sources, including Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch. An ancient literary work called "The Aesop Romance" tells an episodic, probably highly fictional version of his life, including the traditional description of him as a strikingly ugly slave () who by his cleverness acquires freedom and becomes an adviser to kings and city-states. Older spellings of his name have included "Esop(e)" and "Isope". Depictions of Aesop in popular culture over the last 2,500 years have included many works of art and his appearance as a character in numerous books, films, plays, and television programs.


title: Aesop

text: The earliest Greek sources, including Aristotle, indicate that Aesop was born around 620 BCE in the Greek colony of Mesembria. A number of later writers from the Roman imperial period (including Phaedrus, who adapted the fables into Latin) say that he was born in Phrygia. The 3rd-century poet Callimachus called him "Aesop of Sardis," and the later writer Maximus of Tyre called him "the sage of Lydia."


title: Aesop

text: From Aristotle and Herodotus we learn that Aesop was a slave in Samos and that his masters were first a man named Xanthus and then a man named Iadmon; that he must eventually have been freed, because he argued as an advocate for a wealthy Samian; and that he met his end in the city of Delphi. Plutarch tells us that Aesop had come to Delphi on a diplomatic mission from King Croesus of Lydia, that he insulted the Delphians, was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of temple theft, and was thrown from a cliff (after which the Delphians suffered pestilence and famine). Before this fatal episode, Aesop met with Periander of Corinth, where Plutarch has him dining with the Seven Sages of Greece, sitting beside his friend Solon, whom he had met in Sardis. (Leslie Kurke suggests that Aesop himself "was a popular contender for inclusion" in the list of Seven Sages.)


title: Aesop

text: Problems of chronological reconciliation dating the death of Aesop and the reign of Croesus led the Aesop scholar (and compiler of the Perry Index) Ben Edwin Perry in 1965 to conclude that "everything in the ancient testimony about Aesop that pertains to his associations with either Croesus or with any of the so-called Seven Wise Men of Greece must be reckoned as literary fiction," and Perry likewise dismissed Aesop's death in Delphi as legendary; but subsequent research has established that a possible diplomatic mission for Croesus and a visit to Periander "are consistent with the year of Aesop's death." Still problematic is the story by Phaedrus which has Aesop in Athens, telling the fable of the frogs who asked for a king, during the reign of Peisistratos, which occurred decades after the presumed date of Aesop's death.


title: Aesop

text: Along with the scattered references in the ancient sources regarding the life and death of Aesop, there is a highly fictional biography now commonly called "The Aesop Romance" (also known as the "Vita" or "The Life of Aesop" or "The Book of Xanthus the Philosopher and Aesop His Slave"), "an anonymous work of Greek popular literature composed around the second century of our era ... Like "The Alexander Romance", "The Aesop Romance" became a folkbook, a work that belonged to no one, and the occasional writer felt free to modify as it might suit him." Multiple, sometimes contradictory, versions of this work exist. The earliest known version was probably composed in the 1st century CE, but the story may have circulated in different versions for centuries before it was committed to writing, and certain elements can be shown to originate in the 4th century BCE. Scholars long dismissed any historical or biographical validity in "The Aesop Romance"; widespread study of the work began only toward the end of the 20th century.


title: Aesop

text: In "The Aesop Romance", Aesop is a slave of Phrygian origin on the island of Samos, and extremely ugly. At first he lacks the power of speech, but after showing kindness to a priestess of Isis, is granted by the goddess not only speech but a gift for clever storytelling, which he uses alternately to assist and confound his master, Xanthus, embarrassing the philosopher in front of his students and even sleeping with his wife. After interpreting a portent for the people of Samos, Aesop is given his freedom and acts as an emissary between the Samians and King Croesus. Later he travels to the courts of Lycurgus of Babylon and Nectanabo of Egypt – both imaginary rulers – in a section that appears to borrow heavily from the romance of Ahiqar. The story ends with Aesop's journey to Delphi, where he angers the citizens by telling insulting fables, is sentenced to death and, after cursing the people of Delphi, is forced to jump to his death.


title: Aesop

text: Aesop may not have written his fables. "The Aesop Romance" claims that he wrote them down and deposited them in the library of Croesus; Herodotus calls Aesop a "writer of fables" and Aristophanes speaks of "reading" Aesop, but that might simply have been a compilation of fables ascribed to him. Various Classical authors name Aesop as the originator of fables. Sophocles, in a poem addressed to Euripides, made reference to the North Wind and the Sun. Socrates while in prison turned some of the fables into verse, of which Diogenes Laërtius records a small fragment. The early Roman playwright and poet Ennius also rendered at least one of Aesop's fables in Latin verse, of which the last two lines still exist.


title: Aesop

text: Collections of what are claimed to be Aesop's Fables were transmitted by a series of authors writing in both Greek and Latin. Demetrius of Phalerum made what may have been the earliest, probably in prose (), contained in ten books for the use of orators, although that has since been lost. Next appeared an edition in elegiac verse, cited by the Suda, but the author's name is unknown. Phaedrus, a freedman of Augustus, rendered the fables into Latin in the 1st century CE. At about the same time Babrius turned the fables into Greek choliambics. A 3rd-century author, Titianus, is said to have rendered the fables into prose in a work now lost. Avianus (of uncertain date, perhaps the 4th century) translated 42 of the fables into Latin elegiacs. The 4th-century grammarian Dositheus Magister also made a collection of Aesop's Fables, now lost.


title: Aesop

text: Aesop's Fables continued to be revised and translated through the ensuing centuries, with the addition of material from other cultures, so that the body of fables known today bears little relation to those Aesop originally told. With a surge in scholarly interest beginning toward the end of the 20th century, some attempt has been made to determine the nature and content of the very earliest fables which may be most closely linked to the historic Aesop.


title: Aesop

text: The anonymously authored "Aesop Romance" begins with a vivid description of Aesop's appearance, saying he was "of loathsome aspect... potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped—a portentous monstrosity," or as another translation has it, "a faulty creation of Prometheus when half-asleep." The earliest text by a known author that refers to Aesop's appearance is Himerius in the 4th century, who says that Aesop "was laughed at and made fun of, not because of some of his tales but on account of his looks and the sound of his voice." The evidence from both of these sources is dubious, since Himerius lived some 800 years after Aesop and his image of Aesop may have come from "The Aesop Romance", which is essentially fiction; but whether based on fact or not, at some point the idea of an ugly, even deformed Aesop took hold in popular imagination. Scholars have begun to examine why and how this "physiognomic tradition" developed.


title: Aesop

text: A much later tradition depicts Aesop as a black African from Ethiopia. The first known promulgator of the idea was Planudes, a Byzantine scholar of the 13th century who made a recension of "The Aesop Romance" in which it is conjectured that Aesop might have been Ethiopian, given his name. But according to Gert-Jan van Dijk, "Planudes' derivation of 'Aesop' from 'Aethiopian' is... etymologically incorrect," and Frank Snowden says that Planudes' account is "worthless as to the reliability of Aesop as 'Ethiopian.'"


title: Aesop

text: The tradition of Aesop's African origin was continued in Britain, as attested by the lively figurine of a negro from the Chelsea porcelain factory which appeared in its Aesop series in the mid-18th century. It then carried forward into the 19th century. The frontispiece of William Godwin's "Fables Ancient and Modern" (1805) has a copperplate illustration of Aesop relating his stories to little children that gives his features a distinctly African appearance.


title: Aesop

text: The collection includes the fable of "Washing the Blackamoor White", although updating it and making the Ethiopian 'a black footman'. In 1856 William Martin Leake repeated the false etymological linkage of "Aesop" with "Aethiop" when he suggested that the "head of a negro" found on several coins from ancient Delphi (with specimens dated as early as 520 BCE) might depict Aesop, presumably to commemorate (and atone for) his execution at Delphi, but Theodor Panofka supposed the head to be a portrait of Delphos, founder of Delphi, a view which was repeated later by Frank Snowden, who nevertheless notes that the arguments which have been advanced are not sufficient to establish such an identification.


title: Aesop

text: In 1876 the Italian painter Roberto Fontana portrayed the fabulist as black in "Aesop Narrates His Fables to the Handmaids of Xanthus". When the painting was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, a French critic was dubious: "Why is M. Fontana's Aesop…black as an Ethiopian? Perhaps M. Fontana knows more about Aesop than we do, which would not be difficult."


title: Aesop

text: The idea that Aesop was Ethiopian seems supported by the presence of camels, elephants and apes in the fables, even though these African elements are more likely to have come from Egypt and Libya than from Ethiopia, and the fables featuring African animals may have entered the body of Aesopic fables long after Aesop actually lived. Nevertheless, in 1932 the anthropologist J. H. Driberg, repeating the Aesop/Aethiop linkage, asserted that, while "some say he [Aesop] was a Phrygian... the more general view... is that he was an African", and "if Aesop was not an African, he ought to have been;" and in 2002 Richard A. Lobban cited the number of African animals and "artifacts" in the Aesopic fables as "circumstantial evidence" that Aesop was a Nubian folkteller.


title: Aesop

text: Popular perception of Aesop as black was to be encouraged by comparison between his fables and the stories of the trickster Br'er Rabbit told by African-American slaves. In Ian Colvin's introduction to "Aesop in Politics" (1914), for example, the fabulist is bracketed with Uncle Remus, "For both were slaves, and both were black." The traditional role of the slave Aesop as "a kind of culture hero of the oppressed" is further promoted by the fictional "Life", emerging "as a how-to handbook for the successful manipulation of superiors." Such a perception was reinforced at the popular level by the 1971 TV production "Aesop's Fables" in which Bill Cosby played Aesop. In that mixture of live action and animation, Aesop tells fables that differentiate between realistic and unrealistic ambition and his version there of "The Tortoise and the Hare" illustrates how to take advantage of an opponent's over-confidence.


title: Aesop

text: On other continents Aesop has occasionally undergone a degree of acculturation. This is evident in Isango Portobello's 2010 production of the play "Aesop's Fables" at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. Based on a script by British playwright Peter Terson (1983), it was radically adapted by the director Mark Dornford-May as a musical using native African instrumentation, dance and stage conventions. Although Aesop is portrayed as Greek, and dressed in the short Greek tunic, the all-black production contextualises the story in the recent history of South Africa. The former slave, we are told "learns that liberty comes with responsibility as he journeys to his own freedom, joined by the animal characters of his parable-like fables." One might compare with this Brian Seward's "Aesop's Fabulous Fables (2009)," which first played in Singapore with a cast of mixed ethnicities. In it Chinese theatrical routines are merged with those of a standard musical.


title: Aesop

text: There had already been an example of Asian acculturation in 17th-century Japan. There Portuguese missionaries had introduced a translation of the fables ("Esopo no Fabulas", 1593) that included the biography of Aesop. This was then taken up by Japanese printers and taken through several editions under the title "Isopo Monogatari". Even when Europeans were expelled from Japan and Christianity proscribed, this text survived, in part because the figure of Aesop had been assimilated into the culture and depicted in woodcuts as dressed in Japanese costume.


title: Aesop

text: Ancient sources mention two statues of Aesop, one by Aristodemus and another by Lysippus, and Philostratus describes a painting of Aesop surrounded by the animals of his fables. None of these images have survived. According to Philostratus,


title: Aesop

text: With the advent of printing in Europe, various illustrators tried to recreate this scene. One of the earliest was in Spain's "La vida del Ysopet con sus fabulas historiadas" (1489, see above). In France there was I. Baudoin's "Fables d'Ésope Phrygien" (1631) and Matthieu Guillemot's "Les images ou tableaux de platte peinture des deux Philostrates" (1637). In England there was Francis Cleyn's frontispiece to John Ogilby's "The Fables of Aesop" and the much later frontispiece to Godwin's "Fables Ancient and Modern" mentioned above in which the swarthy fabulist points out three of his characters to the children seated about him.