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The wheel was first invented in mesopotamia and it later spread to Asia, Europe, and Africa.

wheels made travel and farming easier back in the day and helped grow cities with trade. today, wheels are used in cars, bikes, trains, etc.. wheels are now used everyday for daily transportation.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-the-wheel-31805121/

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It's fair to say that when an advertisement describes a septic tank as "the best invention since the wheel," we've begun to take our round, load-bearing companion for granted.

In light of Smithsonian's special July coverage of the frontiers of innovation, we thought this would be an appropriate time to pay tribute to one of the origins of innovation by sharing some intriguing, little-known facts about the wheel.
No wheels exist in nature.
Throughout history, most inventions were inspired by the natural world. The idea for the pitchfork and table fork came from forked sticks; the airplane from gliding birds. But the wheel is one hundred percent homo sapien innovation. As Michael LaBarbera-a professor of biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago-wrote in a 1983 issue of The American Naturalist, only bacterial flagella, dung beetles and tumbleweeds come close. And even they are "wheeled organisms" in the loosest use of the term, since they use rolling as a form of locomotion.
The wheel was a relative latecomer.
We tend to think that inventing the wheel was item number two on our to-do list after learning to walk upright. But several significant inventions predated the wheel by thousands of years: sewing needles, woven cloth, rope, basket weaving, boats and even the flute.
The first wheels were not used for transportation.
Evidence indicates they were created to serve as potter's wheels around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia-300 years before someone figured out to use them for chariots.
The ancient Greeks invented Western philosophy...and the wheelbarrow.
Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way of Byzantium or the Islamic world. Although wheelbarrows were expensive to purchase, they could pay for themselves in just 3 or 4 days in terms of labor savings.

Art historian Andrea Matthies has found comical illustrations, one from the 15th century, showing members of the upper classes being pushed to hell in a wheelbarrow-quite possibly the origin for the expression "to hell in a handbasket."
Wheel of Fortune: More than just a game show.
The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae, is much older than Pat Sajak. In fact, the wheel, which the goddess Fortuna spins to determine the fate of those she looks upon, is an ancient concept of either Greek or Roman origin, depending on which academic you talk to. Roman scholar Cicero and the Greek poet Pindar both reference the Wheel of Fortune. In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses the Wheel of Fortune to describe the tragic fall of several historical figures in his Monk's Tale. And William Shakespeare alludes to it in a few of his plays. "Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel!" says a disguised Earl of Kent in King Lear.
Camels 1; Wheel 0
Camels supplanted the wheel as the standard mode of transportation in the Middle East and northern Africa between the second and the sixth centuries A.D. Richard Bulliet cites several possible reasons in his 1975 book, The Camel and the Wheel, including the decline of roads after the fall of the Roman Empire and the invention of the camel saddle between 500 and 100 B.C. Despite abandoning the wheel for hauling purposes, Middle Eastern societies continued to use wheels for tasks such as irrigation, milling and pottery.
"Breaking on the wheel" was a form of capital punishment in the Middle Ages.
This type of execution was medieval even by medieval standards. A person could be stretched across the face of a wheel and bludgeoned to death or have an iron-rimmed wheel pounded across the person's bones with a hammer. In another variation, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was wrapped around the rim of a spiked wheel and rolled across the ground in the early fourth century. Legend has it that the wheel "divinely" broke-sparing St. Catherine's life, until the Romans beheaded her. Since then, the breaking wheel has also been called the "Catherine Wheel." St. Catherine was named the patron saint of wheelwrights.
The oldest, most common design for a perpetual motion device is the overbalanced wheel.
For centuries, tinkerers, philosophers, mathematicians and crackpots have tried to design perpetual motion devices that, once set in motion, would continue forever, producing more energy than they consume. One common take on this machine is a wheel or water mill that uses changes in weight to continually rotate. The overbalanced wheel, for example, has weighted arms attached to the rim of the wheel that fold down or extend out. But no matter what the design, they all violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which state, respectively, that energy cannot be created or destroyed and that some energy is always lost in converting heat to work. The U.S. patent office refuses to assess claims for perpetual motion devices unless the inventors can produce working models.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of patents.
According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the first patent involving a wheel was issued to James Macomb of Princeton, New Jersey, on August 26, 1791-just one year after the U.S. Patent Law was passed. Macomb's invention was a design for a horizontal, hollow water wheel to create hydropower for mills. Although the patent office is aware of this patent being issued, the original record was destroyed along with other patents from the 18th century in an 1836 fire.
The earliest wheels in North America were used for toys.
In the 1940s, archaeologists unearthed wheeled toys-ceramic dogs and other animals with wheels as legs-in pre-Colombian layers of sediment in Vera Cruz, Mexico. The indigenous peoples of North America, however, would not use wheels for transportation until the arrival of European settlers.
Roulette means "small wheel" in French.
The origin of the gambling game roulette is a bit hazy. Some sources say Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French mathematician, invented it in his attempts to create a perpetual motion device. But what's more commonly accepted is that roulette is an 18th century French creation that combined several existing games.
The term "fifth wheel" comes from a part that was often used in carriages.
By definition, a fifth wheel is a wheel or a portion of a wheel with two parts rotating on each other that sits on the front axle of a carriage and adds extra support so it doesn't tip. But it's superfluous, really-which is why calling someone a "fifth wheel" is a way of calling them unnecessary, basically a tagalong.
How the bicycle ruined enlightened conversation.
As reported in the New York Times, an 1896 column in the London Spectator mourned the impact of the bicycle on British society: "The phase of the wheel's influence that strike ...most forcibly is, to put it briefly, the abolition of dinner and the advent of lunch....If people can pedal away ten miles or so in the middle of the day to a lunch for which they need no dress, where the talk is haphazard, varied, light, and only too easy; and then glide back in the cool of the afternoon to dine quietly and get early to bed...conversation of the more serious type will tend to go out."
The first Ferris Wheel was built to rival the Eiffel Tower.
Norman Anderson, author of Ferris Wheels: An Illustrated History, surmises that the first pleasure wheels, or early Ferris Wheels, were probably just wheels with buckets, used to raise water from a stream, that children would playfully grab hold of for a ride. But it was the "revolving wheel, 250 feet in diameter and capable of carrying 2,160 persons per trip," invented by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. and unveiled at Chicago's World Columbian Fair in 1893, that really brought the Ferris Wheel to the carnival scene. The fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, and organizers wanted a centerpiece like the 984-foot Eiffel Tower that was created for the Paris Exposition of 1889. Ferris answered that call. He apparently told the press that he sketched every detail of his Ferris wheel over a dinner at a Chicago chophouse, and no detail needed changing in its execution.
In movies and on TV, wheels appear to rotate in reverse.
Movie cameras typically operate at a speed of about 24 frames per second. So basically, if a spoke of a wheel is in a 12 o'clock position in one frame and then in the next frame, the spoke previously in the 9 o'clock position has moved to 12 o'clock, then the wheel appears stationary. But if in that frame another spoke is in the 11:30 position, then it appears to be revolving backwards. This optical illusion, called the wagon wheel effect, also can occur in the presence of a strobe light.
One man actually succeeded in reinventing the wheel.
John Keogh, a freelance patent lawyer in Australia, submitted a patent application for a "circular transportation facilitation device" in May 2001, shortly after a new patent system was introduced in Australia. He wanted to prove that the cheap, streamlined system, which allows inventors to draft a patent online without the help of a lawyer, was flawed. His "wheel" was issued a patent.

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Always cited as the hallmark of man's innovation, here is the real story behind the wheel - from its origins to its reinvention

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The Neolithic Revolution began in Mesopotamia. this affects the world.

This event was the beginning of people moving into a static community as opposed to the nomadic movements of the past. People began to grow crops.

The change that came from this even was that people now live in agricultural centered towns as opposed to moving around nomadically.

https://www.history.com/topics/pre-history/neolithic-revolution

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Gunpowder invention began in China in 9th century (800) CE.this venet impacted the entire globe

gunpowder was discovered by chinese monks that wanted to create a life-extending elixir. This was an accidental invention that most of the world began to use for combat.

This vent changed the way we fight wars for the rest of human history.

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/13things/7687.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CGunpowder%2C%E2%80%9D%20as%20it%20came,come%20into%20contact%20with%20it

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“Gunpowder,” as it came to be known, is a mixture of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal. Together, these materials will burn rapidly and explode as a propellant.

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The Invention of the printing press started in China. it mainly impacted Europe but eventually became worldwide.

this event was the creation of the printing press,it is a device that allows for the mass production of uniform printed matter, mainly text in the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers. this was created by Johannes Gutenberg.

The printing press impacted the world by making books more accessible and increasing literacy around the world.

https://www.history.com/articles/printing-press

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Printing Press - Invented, Gutenberg, Significance | HISTORY

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The printing press, which allows for the mass production of printed matter, originated in China before Johannes Gutenberg perfected his version around 1450.

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the Protestant Reformation started in 1517 in germany when martin luther spoke out against the catholic church. It spread across Europe and later the Americas, africa, as well as Asia.

It led to new churches, more people reading the bible, and more religious freedom. today it still affects how people practice christianity around the world.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/protestant-reformation/

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The Industrial Revolution Begins 1760-1840

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The Industrial Revolution Begins 1760-1840

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The Industrial revolution mainly impacted Europe and North America, but eventually spread to other regions like asia.

the industrial revolution was a huge change starting in the 1700's into the 1800's. it was the change of people moving from working on farms and making stuff by hand to using machines in factories.

this revolution led to mass production, and urbanization as people moved to cities for jobs. it improved transportation but also caused issues like poor working conditions and pollution.

https://www.history.com/articles/industrial-revolution

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Industrial Revolution: Definition, Inventions & Dates - HISTORY

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The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, a time of great growth in technologies and inventions, transformed rural societies into industrialized, urban ones.

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the first useful application of steam powere was created by Thomas savory, and James Watt made it better in the 1760’s. It mainly impacted Europe and North America.

In a steam engine, hot steam, usually supplies by a boiler, expands under pressure to operate things. Thomas Savory described it as “the minors friend” because it was intended to be used to raise water to drain mines.

The intention of the steam engine later changed how stuff was made and how people traveled during the Industrial Revolution.

https://www.ncm.org.uk/news/the-rise-of-the-steam-engine/

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It was known as far back as the ancient Greeks that steam could produce movement. This was shown by directing steam across a model windmill, which began to turn. But it was only when the coal mining industry had started to develop that steam was looked at as a viable power.

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The French Revolution mainly impacted France, but its ideas and events spread across Europe and influenced other parts of the world.

This was a watershed event in history that ended with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. During this period, French citizens altered their political landscape, and fought for equality and liberty.

The French Revolution inspired movements for democracy and rights, changing France and influencing many other countries.

https://www.history.com/articles/french-revolution

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French Revolution: Timeline, Causes & Dates | HISTORY

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The French Revolution began in 1789. Soon, the Bastille was stormed and the monarchy eliminated. After the Reign of Terror, France established a new government.

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When cotton gin was created, it mainly affected the American South during the 19th century.

The cotton gin is a machine that cleans cotton from its seeds, It was created by Eli whitney the year 1793. this invention increased cotton production and impacted the institution of slavery

https://www.britannica.com/technology/cotton-gin

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

cotton gin, machine for cleaning cotton of its seeds, invented in the United States by Eli Whitney in 1793. The cotton gin is an example of an invention directly called forth by an immediate demand; the mechanization of spinning in England had created a greatly expanded market for American cotton, whose production was inhibited by the slowness of manual removal of the seeds from the raw fibre. Whitney, a Massachusetts Yankee visiting a friend in the South, learned of the problem and quickly solved it. Inspired by manual brushes invented by enslaved workers, Whitney crafted a device that pulled the cotton through a set of wire teeth mounted on a revolving cylinder, the fibre passing through narrow slots in an iron breastwork too small to permit passage of the seed. The simplicity of the invention-which could be powered by people, animals, or water-caused it to be widely copied despite Whitney's patent; it is credited with fixing cotton cultivation, virtually to the exclusion of other crops, in the U.S. South and so institutionalizing slavery.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Melissa Petruzzello.

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Cotton gin | Definition, Inventor, Impact, & Facts

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Cotton gin, machine for cleaning cotton of its seeds, invented in the United States by Eli Whitney in 1793. It is credited with fixing cotton cultivation, virtually to the exclusion of other crops, in the U.S. South and so institutionalizing slavery.

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the Haitian revolution began in Haiti,it soon impacted the whole world by inspiring enslaved people to fight for their freedom.

this event was a series of conflicts between haitian slaves, colonists, the armies of the british and French colonizers, and a number of other parties. Slaves fought for their independence.

the Haitian people ultimately won independence from france and therefore became the first country to be founded by former slaves.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Haitian-Revolution

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What was the Haitian Revolution?

Why did the Haitian Revolution start?

How is the Haitian Revolution related to the French Revolution?

Who did the Haitian Revolution involve?

Why is the Haitian Revolution important?

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Haitian Revolution, series of conflicts between 1791 and 1804 between Haitian slaves, colonists, the armies of the British and French colonizers, and a number of other parties. Through the struggle, the Haitian people ultimately won independence from France and thereby became the first country to be founded by former slaves.

Colonial rule and slavery

The Spanish began to enslave the native Taino and Ciboney people soon after December 1492, when Italian navigator Christopher Columbus sighted the island that he called La Isla Española ("The Spanish Island"; later Anglicized as Hispaniola.) The island's indigenous population, forced to mine for gold, was devastated by European diseases and brutal working conditions, and by the end of the 16th century the people had virtually vanished. Thousands of slaves imported from other Caribbean islands met the same fate.

After the main gold mines were exhausted, the Spanish were succeeded by the French, who established their own permanent settlements, including Port-de-Paix (1665) in the northwest, and the French West Indies Corporation took control of the area. Landowners in western Hispaniola imported increasing numbers of African slaves, who totaled about 5,000 in the late 17th century. By 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, the estimated population of Saint-Domingue, as the French called their colony, was 556,000 and included roughly 500,000 African slaves, 32,000 European colonists, and 24,000 affranchis (free mulattoes [people of mixed African and European descent] or blacks).

Haitian society was deeply fragmented by skin colour, class, and gender. The affranchis, most of them mulattoes, were sometimes slave owners themselves and aspired to the economic and social levels of the Europeans. They feared and spurned the slave majority but were generally discriminated against by the white European colonists, who were merchants, landowners, overseers, craftsmen, and the like. The aspirations of the affranchis became a major factor in the colony's struggle for independence. A large part of the slave population was African-born, from a number of West African peoples. The vast majority worked in the fields; others were household servants, boilermen (at the sugar mills), and even slave drivers. Slaves endured long, backbreaking workdays and often died from injuries, infections, and tropical diseases. Malnutrition and starvation also were common. Some slaves managed to escape into the mountainous interior, where they became known as Maroons and fought guerrilla battles against colonial militia.

Factional conflict and the rise of Toussaint Louverture

Against this background arose a revolution, beginning as a series of conflicts from the early 1790s. Among the causes of the conflicts were the affranchis' frustrations with a racist society, turmoil created in the colony by the French Revolution, nationalistic rhetoric expressed during Vodou ceremonies, the continuing brutality of slave owners, and wars between European powers. Vincent Ogé, a mulatto who had lobbied the Parisian assembly for colonial reforms, led an uprising in late 1790 but was captured, tortured, and executed.

In May 1791 the French revolutionary government granted citizenship to the wealthier affranchis, but Haiti's European population disregarded the law. Within two months isolated fighting broke out between Europeans and affranchis, and in August thousands of slaves rose in rebellion. The Europeans attempted to appease the mulattoes in order to quell the slave revolt, and the French assembly granted citizenship to all affranchis in April 1792. The country was torn by rival factions, some of which were supported by Spanish colonists in Santo Domingo (on the eastern side of the island, which later became the Dominican Republic) or by British troops from Jamaica. In 1793 a commissioner, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, was sent from France to maintain order and offered freedom to slaves who joined his army; he soon abolished slavery altogether, a decision confirmed the following year by the French government.

In the late 1790s Toussaint Louverture, a military leader and former slave, gained control of several areas and earned the initial support of French agents. He gave nominal allegiance to France while pursuing his own political and military designs, which included negotiating with the British. In January 1801 Toussaint conquered Santo Domingo, and in May of that year, he had himself named "governor-general for life." He put the peasants back to work on the plantations under military rule and encouraged many of the French proprietors to return. In December 1801 Napoléon Bonaparte (later Napoleon I), wishing to maintain control of the island, attempted to restore the old regime (and European rule) by sending his brother-in-law, Gen. Charles Leclerc, with an experienced force from Saint-Domingue that included Alexandre Sabès Pétion and several other exiled mulatto officers. Toussaint struggled for several months against Leclerc's forces before agreeing to an armistice in May 1802; however, the French broke the agreement and imprisoned him in France. He died on April 7, 1803.

Independent Haiti

Some of Toussaint's lieutenants-most notably Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe- resumed the war against the French in 1802. They were soon joined by Pétion and other mulatto leaders, who were infuriated by the restoration of the restrictions on their caste. Both the blacks and the mulattoes were enraged by reports that France had reestablished slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique, and the struggle was carried on with great desperation. The French were weakened by an epidemic of yellow fever-Leclerc succumbed to the disease in November 1802-and the conclusion of the Louisiana Purchase in May 1803 signaled Napoleon's intention to withdraw from North America. Less than three weeks later, the French position in Haiti became truly hopeless with the renewal of hostilities between France and Britain on May 18, 1803.

On November 18 the Armée indigène (French: "Indigenous Army") under Dessalines defeated the French at the Battle of Vertières, and French Gen. Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, surrendered Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), the last significant French stronghold. Under the terms of the surrender, the French were given 10 days to evacuate, but Rochambeau showed no haste in embarking his troops. Dessalines responded by threatening to turn his cannons on the French ships at anchor in Cap-Français harbour. Ironically, it would fall to the Royal Navy, which had been blockading Saint-Domingue since the resumption of the Napoleonic Wars, to carry out the evacuation. British Capt. John Bligh treated with both Rochambeau and Dessalines, and the French garrison finally departed Cap-Français as British prisoners. While this marked the end of French military action on Haiti, France continued to maintain a presence in the eastern part of the island until 1809.

On January 1, 1804, the entire island was declared independent under the Arawak-derived name of Haiti. Many European powers and their Caribbean surrogates ostracized Haiti, fearing the spread of slave revolts, whereas reaction in the United States was mixed; slave-owning states did all they could to suppress news of the rebellion, but merchants in the free states hoped to trade with Haiti rather than with European powers. More important, nearly the entire population was utterly destitute-a legacy of slavery that has continued to have a profound impact on Haitian history.

In October 1804 Dessalines assumed the title of Emperor Jacques I, but in October 1806 he was killed while trying to suppress a mulatto revolt, and Henry Christophe took control of the kingdom from his capital in the north. Civil war then broke out between Christophe and Sabès Pétion, who was based at Port-au-Prince in the south. Christophe, who declared himself King Henry I in 1811, managed to improve the country's economy but at the cost of forcing former slaves to return to work on the plantations. He built a spectacular palace (Sans Souci) as well as an imposing fortress (La Citadelle Laferrière) in the hills to the south of the city of Cap-Haïtien, where, with mutinous soldiers almost at his door, he committed suicide in 1820. It was not until 1825 that France recognized Haiti's independence, and then only in exchange for a large indemnity of 100 million francs, with a repayment period until 1887.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Michael Ray.

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Haitian Revolution | Causes, Summary, & Facts

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Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), series of conflicts between Haitian slaves, colonists, the armies of the British and French colonizers, and a number of other parties. Through the struggle, the Haitian people ultimately won independence from France and thereby became the first country to be founded by former slaves.

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The Telegraph was first used in 1844, it connected to places like europe, america, and parts of asia.

The telegraph changed the world by making long distance communication fast. It helped people share news quickly, even during wars. this was the start of modern technology like phones and the internet.

https://www.britannica.com/technology/telegraph

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telegraph, any device or system that allows the transmission of information by coded signal over distance. Many telegraphic systems have been used over the centuries, but the term is most often understood to refer to the electric telegraph, which was developed in the mid-19th century and for more than 100 years was the principal means of transmitting printed information by wire or radio wave.

Preelectric telegraph systems

The word telegraph is derived from the Greek words tele, meaning "distant," and graphein, meaning "to write." It came into use toward the end of the 18th century to describe an optical semaphore system developed in France. However, many types of telegraphic communication have been employed since before recorded history. The earliest methods of communication at a distance made use of such media as smoke, fire, drums, and reflected rays of the Sun. Visual signals given by flags and torches were used for short-range communication and continued to be utilized well into the 20th century, when the two-flag semaphore system was widely used, particularly by the world's navies.

Before the development of the electric telegraph, visual systems were used to convey messages over distances by means of variable displays. One of the most successful of the visual telegraphs was the semaphore developed in France by the Chappe brothers, Claude and Ignace, in 1791. This system consisted of pairs of movable arms mounted at the ends of a crossbeam on hilltop towers. Each arm of the semaphore could assume seven angular positions 45° apart, and the horizontal beam could tilt 45° clockwise or counterclockwise. In this manner it was possible to represent numbers and the letters of the alphabet. Chains of these towers were built to permit transmission over long distances. The towers were spaced at intervals of 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles), and a signaling rate of three symbols per minute could be achieved.

Another widely used visual telegraph was developed in 1795 by George Murray in England. In Murray's device, characters were sent by opening and closing various combinations of six shutters. This system rapidly caught on in England and in the United States, where a number of sites bearing the name Telegraph Hill or Signal Hill can still be found, particularly in coastal regions. Visual telegraphs were completely replaced by the electric telegraph by the middle of the 19th century.

The beginning of electric telegraphy

The electric telegraph did not burst suddenly upon the scene but rather resulted from a scientific evolution that had been taking place since the 18th century in the field of electricity. One of the key developments was the invention of the voltaic cell in 1800 by Alessandro Volta of Italy. This made it possible to power electric devices in a more effective manner using relatively low voltages and high currents. Previous methods of producing electricity employed frictional generation of static electricity, which led to high voltages and low currents. Many devices incorporating high-voltage static electricity and various detectors such as pith balls and sparks were proposed for use in telegraphic systems. All were unsuccessful, however, because the severe losses in the transmission wires, particularly in bad weather, limited reliable operation to relatively short distances. Application of the battery to telegraphy was made possible by several further developments in the new science of electromagnetism. In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted of Denmark discovered that a magnetic needle could be deflected by a wire carrying an electric current. In 1825 in Britain William Sturgeon discovered the multiturn electromagnet, and in 1831 Michael Faraday of Britain and Joseph Henry of the United States refined the science of electromagnetism sufficiently to make it possible to design practical electromagnetic devices.

The first two practical electric telegraphs appeared at almost the same time. In 1837 the British inventors Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone obtained a patent on a telegraph system that employed six wires and actuated five needle pointers attached to five galvanoscopes at the receiver. If currents were sent through the proper wires, the needles could be made to point to specific letters and numbers on their mounting plate.

In 1832 Samuel F.B. Morse, a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York (later New York University), became interested in the possibility of electric telegraphy and made sketches of ideas for such a system. In 1835 he devised a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers. In 1837 he was granted a patent on an electromagnetic telegraph. Morse's original transmitter incorporated a device called a portarule, which employed molded type with built-in dots and dashes. The type could be moved through a mechanism in such a manner that the dots and dashes would make and break the contact between the battery and the wire to the receiver. The receiver, or register, embossed the dots and dashes on an unwinding strip of paper that passed under a stylus. The stylus was actuated by an electromagnet turned on and off by the signals from the transmitter.

Morse had formed a partnership with Alfred Vail, who was a clever mechanic and is credited with many contributions to the Morse system. Among them are the replacement of the portarule transmitter by a simple make-and-break key, the refinement of the Morse Code so that the shortest code sequences were assigned to the most frequently occurring letters, and the improvement of the mechanical design of all the system components. The first demonstration of the system by Morse was conducted for his friends at his workplace in 1837. In 1843 Morse obtained financial support from the U.S. government to build a demonstration telegraph system 60 km (35 miles) long between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Md. Wires were attached by glass insulators to poles alongside a railroad. The system was completed and public use initiated on May 24, 1844, with transmission of the message, "What hath God wrought!" This inaugurated the telegraph era in the United States, which was to last more than 100 years.

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Telegraph, any device or system that allows the transmission of information by coded signal over distance. The term most often refers to the electric telegraph, which was developed in the mid-19th century and for more than 100 years was the principal means of transmitting printed information.

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Internal Combustion Engine Invented 1860's

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Internal Combustion Engine Invented 1860's

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the invention of the internal combustion engine mainly affected europe and North America at first, it then impacted economies and the world globally.

the internal combustion engine is a type of engine that generates power by burning fuel inside the engine itself, invented by Nikolaus Otto and Karl Benz. This engine creates energy that moves pistons, which help power cars.

this event revolutionized transportation by making cars and trucks popular. It also boosted the economy by making it easier to transport goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine

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Diagram of a cylinder as found in an overhead cam 4-stroke gasoline engine:

An internal combustion engine ( ICE or IC engine) is a heat engine in which the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer (usually air) in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal combustion engine, the expansion of the high- temperature and high- pressure gases produced by combustion applies direct force to some component of the engine. The force is typically applied to pistons ( piston engine), turbine blades ( gas turbine), a rotor (Wankel engine), or a nozzle ( jet engine). This force moves the component over a distance, transforming chemical energy into kinetic energy which is used to propel, move or power whatever the engine is attached to.

The first commercially successful internal combustion engine was created by Étienne Lenoir around 1860, and the first modern internal combustion engine, known as the Otto engine, was created in 1876 by Nicolaus Otto. The term internal combustion engine usually refers to an engine in which combustion is intermittent, such as the more familiar two-stroke and four-stroke piston engines, along with variants, such as the six-stroke piston engine and the Wankel rotary engine. A second class of internal combustion engines use continuous combustion: gas turbines, jet engines and most rocket engines, each of which are internal combustion engines on the same principle as previously described. ( Firearms are also a form of internal combustion engine, though of a type so specialized that they are commonly treated as a separate category, along with weaponry such as mortars and anti-aircraft cannons.) In contrast, in external combustion engines, such as steam or Stirling engines, energy is delivered to a working fluid not consisting of, mixed with, or contaminated by combustion products. Working fluids for external combustion engines include air, hot water, pressurized water or even boiler-heated liquid sodium.

In 1854 in the UK, the Italian inventors Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci obtained the certification: "Obtaining Motive Power by the Explosion of Gases". In 1857 the Great Seal Patent Office conceded them patent No.1655 for the invention of an "Improved Apparatus for Obtaining Motive Power from Gases". Barsanti and Matteucci obtained other patents for the same invention in France, Belgium and Piedmont between 1857 and 1859. In 1860, Belgian engineer Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine. In 1864, Nicolaus Otto patented the first atmospheric gas engine. In 1872, American George Brayton invented the first commercial liquid-fueled internal combustion engine. In 1876, Nicolaus Otto began working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, patented the compressed charge, four-cycle engine. In 1879, Karl Benz patented a reliable two-stroke gasoline engine. Later, in 1886, Benz began the first commercial production of motor vehicles with an internal combustion engine, in which a three-wheeled, four-cycle engine and chassis formed a single unit. In 1892, Rudolf Diesel developed the first compressed charge, compression ignition engine. In 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. In 1939, the Heinkel He 178 became the world's first jet aircraft.

At one time, the word engine (via Old French, from Latin ingenium, "ability") meant any piece of machinery-a sense that persists in expressions such as siege engine. A "motor" (from Latin motor, "mover") is any machine that produces mechanical power. Traditionally, electric motors are not referred to as "engines"; however, combustion engines are often referred to as "motors". (An electric engine refers to a locomotive operated by electricity.)

In boating, an internal combustion engine that is installed in the hull is referred to as an engine, but the engines that sit on the transom are referred to as motors.

Reciprocating engine of a car

Diesel generator for backup power

Reciprocating piston engines are by far the most common power source for land and water vehicles, including automobiles, motorcycles, ships and to a lesser extent, locomotives (some are electrical but most use diesel engines). Rotary engines of the Wankel design are used in some automobiles, aircraft and motorcycles. These are collectively known as internal-combustion-engine vehicles (ICEV).

Where high power-to-weight ratios are required, internal combustion engines appear in the form of combustion turbines, or sometimes Wankel engines. Powered aircraft typically use an ICE which may be a reciprocating engine. Airplanes can instead use jet engines and helicopters can instead employ turboshafts; both of which are types of turbines. In addition to providing propulsion, airliners may employ a separate ICE as an auxiliary power unit. Wankel engines are fitted to many unmanned aerial vehicles.

ICEs drive large electric generators that power electrical grids. They are found in the form of combustion turbines with a typical electrical output in the range of some 100 MW. Combined cycle power plants use the high temperature exhaust to boil and superheat water steam to run a steam turbine. Thus, the efficiency is higher because more energy is extracted from the fuel than what could be extracted by the combustion engine alone. Combined cycle power plants achieve efficiencies in the range of 50-60%. In a smaller scale, stationary engines like gas engines or diesel generators are used for backup or for providing electrical power to areas not connected to an electric grid.

Small engines (usually 2‐stroke gasoline/petrol engines) are a common power source for lawnmowers, string trimmers, chain saws, leafblowers, pressure washers, snowmobiles, jet skis, outboard motors, mopeds, and motorcycles.

There are several possible ways to classify internal combustion engines.

By number of strokes:

By type of ignition:

By mechanical/thermodynamic cycle (these cycles are infrequently used but are commonly found in hybrid vehicles, along with other vehicles manufactured for fuel efficiency):

Gas turbine engine

Turbojet, through a propelling nozzle

Turbofan, through a duct-fan

Turboprop, through an unducted propeller, usually with variable pitch

Turboshaft, a gas turbine optimized for producing mechanical torque instead of thrust

Ramjet, similar to a turbojet but uses vehicle speed to compress (ram) the air instead of a compressor.

Scramjet, a variant of the ramjet that uses supersonic combustion.

Rocket engine

The base of a reciprocating internal combustion engine is the engine block, which is typically made of cast iron (due to its good wear resistance and low cost) or aluminum. In the latter case, the cylinder liners are made of cast iron or steel, or a coating such as nikasil or alusil. The engine block contains the cylinders. In engines with more than one cylinder they are usually arranged either in 1 row ( straight engine) or 2 rows ( boxer engine or V engine); 3 or 4 rows are occasionally used ( W engine) in contemporary engines, and other engine configurations are possible and have been used. Single cylinder engines (or thumpers) are common for motorcycles and other small engines found in light machinery. On the outer side of the cylinder, passages that contain cooling fluid are cast into the engine block whereas, in some heavy duty engines, the passages are the types of removable cylinder sleeves which can be replaceable. Water-cooled engines contain passages in the engine block where cooling fluid circulates (the water jacket). Some small engines are air-cooled, and instead of having a water jacket the cylinder block has fins protruding away from it to cool the engine by directly transferring heat to the air. The cylinder walls are usually finished by honing to obtain a cross hatch, which is able to retain more oil. A too rough surface would quickly harm the engine by excessive wear on the piston.

The pistons are short cylindrical parts which seal one end of the cylinder from the high pressure of the compressed air and combustion products and slide continuously within it while the engine is in operation. In smaller engines, the pistons are made of aluminum; while in larger applications, they are typically made of cast iron. In performance applications, pistons can also be titanium or forged steel for greater strength. The top surface of the piston is called its crown and is typically flat or concave. Some two-stroke engines use pistons with a deflector head. Pistons are open at the bottom and hollow except for an integral reinforcement structure (the piston web). When an engine is working, the gas pressure in the combustion chamber exerts a force on the piston crown which is transferred through its web to a gudgeon pin. Each piston has rings fitted around its circumference that mostly prevent the gases from leaking into the crankcase or the oil into the combustion chamber. A ventilation system drives the small amount of gas that escapes past the pistons during normal operation (the blow-by gases) out of the crankcase so that it does not accumulate contaminating the oil and creating corrosion. In two-stroke gasoline engines the crankcase is part of the air-fuel path and due to the continuous flow of it, two-stroke engines do not need a separate crankcase ventilation system.

The cylinder head is attached to the engine block by numerous bolts or studs. It has several functions. The cylinder head seals the cylinders on the side opposite to the pistons; it contains short ducts (the ports) for intake and exhaust and the associated intake valves that open to let the cylinder be filled with fresh air and exhaust valves that open to allow the combustion gases to escape. However, 2-stroke crankcase scavenged engines connect the gas ports directly to the cylinder wall without poppet valves; the piston controls their opening and occlusion instead. The cylinder head also holds the spark plug in the case of spark ignition engines and the injector for engines that use direct injection. All CI (compression ignition) engines use fuel injection, usually direct injection but some engines instead use indirect injection. SI (spark ignition) engines can use a carburetor or fuel injection as port injection or direct injection. Most SI engines have a single spark plug per cylinder but some have 2. A head gasket prevents the gas from leaking between the cylinder head and the engine block. The opening and closing of the valves is controlled by one or several camshafts and springs-or in some engines-a desmodromic mechanism that uses no springs. The camshaft may press directly the stem of the valve or may act upon a rocker arm, again, either directly or through a pushrod.

The crankcase is sealed at the bottom with a sump that collects the falling oil during normal operation to be cycled again. The cavity created between the cylinder block and the sump houses a crankshaft that converts the reciprocating motion of the pistons to rotational motion. The crankshaft is held in place relative to the engine block by main bearings, which allow it to rotate. Bulkheads in the crankcase form a half of every main bearing; the other half is a detachable cap. In some cases a single main bearing deck is used rather than several smaller caps. A connecting rod is connected to offset sections of the crankshaft (the crankpins) in one end and to the piston in the other end through the gudgeon pin and thus transfers the force and translates the reciprocating motion of the pistons to the circular motion of the crankshaft. The end of the connecting rod attached to the gudgeon pin is called its small end, and the other end, where it is connected to the crankshaft, the big end. The big end has a detachable half to allow assembly around the crankshaft. It is kept together to the connecting rod by removable bolts.

The cylinder head has an intake manifold and an exhaust manifold attached to the corresponding ports. The intake manifold connects to the air filter directly, or to a carburetor when one is present, which is then connected to the air filter. It distributes the air incoming from these devices to the individual cylinders. The exhaust manifold is the first component in the exhaust system. It collects the exhaust gases from the cylinders and drives it to the following component in the path. The exhaust system of an ICE may also include a catalytic converter and muffler. The final section in the path of the exhaust gases is the tailpipe.

Diagram showing the operation of a 4-stroke SI engine. Labels:
1 ‐ Induction
2 ‐ Compression
3 ‐ Power
4 ‐ Exhaust

The top dead center (TDC) of a piston is the position where it is nearest to the valves; bottom dead center (BDC) is the opposite position where it is furthest from them. A stroke is the movement of a piston from TDC to BDC or vice versa, together with the associated process. While an engine is in operation, the crankshaft rotates continuously at a nearly constant speed. In a 4-stroke ICE, each piston experiences 2 strokes per crankshaft revolution in the following order. Starting the description at TDC, these are:

1. Intake, induction or suction: The intake valves are open as a result of the cam lobe pressing down on the valve stem. The piston moves downward increasing the volume of the combustion chamber and allowing air to enter in the case of a CI engine or an air-fuel mix in the case of SI engines that do not use direct injection. The air or air-fuel mixture is called the charge in any case.

2. Compression: In this stroke, both valves are closed and the piston moves upward reducing the combustion chamber volume which reaches its minimum when the piston is at TDC. The piston performs work on the charge as it is being compressed; as a result, its pressure, temperature and density increase; an approximation to this behavior is provided by the ideal gas law. Just before the piston reaches TDC, ignition begins. In the case of a SI engine, the spark plug receives a high voltage pulse that generates the spark which gives it its name and ignites the charge. In the case of a CI engine, the fuel injector quickly injects fuel into the combustion chamber as a spray; the fuel ignites due to the high temperature.

3. Power or working stroke: The pressure of the combustion gases pushes the piston downward, generating more kinetic energy than is required to compress the charge. Complementary to the compression stroke, the combustion gases expand and as a result their temperature, pressure and density decreases. When the piston is near to BDC the exhaust valve opens. In the blowdown, the combustion gases expand irreversibly due to the leftover pressure-in excess of back pressure, the gauge pressure on the exhaust port.

4. Exhaust: The exhaust valve remains open while the piston moves upward expelling the combustion gases. For naturally aspirated engines a small part of the combustion gases may remain in the cylinder during normal operation because the piston does not close the combustion chamber completely; these gases dissolve in the next charge. At the end of this stroke, the exhaust valve closes, the intake valve opens, and the sequence repeats in the next cycle. The intake valve may open before the exhaust valve closes to allow better scavenging.

The defining characteristic of this kind of engine is that each piston completes a cycle every crankshaft revolution. The 4 processes of intake, compression, power and exhaust take place in only 2 strokes so that it is not possible to dedicate a stroke exclusively for each of them. Starting at TDC the cycle consists of:

1. Power: While the piston is descending the combustion gases perform work on it, as in a 4-stroke engine. The same thermodynamics for the expansion apply.

2. Scavenging: Around 75° of crankshaft rotation before BDC the exhaust valve or port opens, and blowdown occurs. Shortly thereafter the intake valve or transfer port opens. The incoming charge displaces the remaining combustion gases to the exhaust system and a part of the charge may enter the exhaust system as well. The piston reaches BDC and reverses direction. After the piston has traveled a short distance upwards into the cylinder the exhaust valve or port closes; shortly the intake valve or transfer port closes as well.

3. Compression: With both intake and exhaust closed the piston continues moving upwards compressing the charge and performing work on it. As in the case of a 4-stroke engine, ignition starts just before the piston reaches TDC and the same consideration on the thermodynamics of the compression on the charge apply.

Some SI engines are crankcase scavenged and do not use poppet valves. Instead, the crankcase and the part of the cylinder below the piston is used as a pump. The intake port is connected to the crankcase through a reed valve or a rotary disk valve driven by the engine. For each cylinder, a transfer port connects in one end to the crankcase and in the other end to the cylinder wall. The exhaust port is connected directly to the cylinder wall. The transfer and exhaust port are opened and closed by the piston. The reed valve opens when the crankcase pressure is slightly below intake pressure, to let it be filled with a new charge; this happens when the piston is moving upwards. When the piston is moving downwards the pressure in the crankcase increases and the reed valve closes promptly, then the charge in the crankcase is compressed. When the piston is moving downwards, it also uncovers the exhaust port and the transfer port and the higher pressure of the charge in the crankcase makes it enter the cylinder through the transfer port, blowing the exhaust gases. Lubrication is accomplished by adding two-stroke oil to the fuel in small ratios. Petroil refers to the mix of gasoline with the aforesaid oil. This kind of 2-stroke engine has a lower efficiency than comparable 4-strokes engines and releases more polluting exhaust gases for the following conditions:

They use a total-loss oiling system: all the lubricating oil is eventually burned along with the fuel.

There are conflicting requirements for scavenging: On one side, enough fresh charge needs to be introduced in each cycle to displace almost all the combustion gases but introducing too much of it means that a part of it gets in the exhaust.

They must use the transfer port(s) as a carefully designed and placed nozzle so that a gas current is created in a way that it sweeps the whole cylinder before reaching the exhaust port so as to expel the combustion gases, but minimize the amount of charge exhausted. 4-stroke engines have the benefit of forcibly expelling almost all of the combustion gases because during exhaust the combustion chamber is reduced to its minimum volume. In crankcase scavenged 2-stroke engines, exhaust and intake are performed mostly simultaneously and with the combustion chamber at its maximum volume.

The main advantage of 2-stroke engines of this type is mechanical simplicity and a higher power-to-weight ratio than their 4-stroke counterparts. Despite having twice as many power strokes per cycle, less than twice the power of a comparable 4-stroke engine is attainable in practice.

In the US, 2-stroke engines were banned for road vehicles due to the pollution. Off-road only motorcycles are still often 2-stroke but are rarely road legal. However, many thousands of 2-stroke lawn maintenance engines are in use.[citation needed ]

Using a separate blower avoids many of the shortcomings of crankcase scavenging, at the expense of increased complexity which means a higher cost and an increase in maintenance requirement. An engine of this type uses ports or valves for intake and valves for exhaust, except opposed piston engines, which may also use ports for exhaust. The blower is usually of the Roots-type but other types have been used too. This design is commonplace in CI engines, and has been occasionally used in SI engines.

CI engines that use a blower typically use uniflow scavenging. In this design the cylinder wall contains several intake ports placed uniformly spaced along the circumference just above the position that the piston crown reaches when at BDC. An exhaust valve or several like that of 4-stroke engines is used. The final part of the intake manifold is an air sleeve that feeds the intake ports. The intake ports are placed at a horizontal angle to the cylinder wall (I.e: they are in plane of the piston crown) to give a swirl to the incoming charge to improve combustion. The largest reciprocating IC are low speed CI engines of this type; they are used for marine propulsion (see marine diesel engine) or electric power generation and achieve the highest thermal efficiencies among internal combustion engines of any kind. Some diesel-electric locomotive engines operate on the 2-stroke cycle. The most powerful of them have a brake power of around 4.5 MW or 6,000 HP. The EMD SD90MAC class of locomotives are an example of such. The comparable class GE AC6000CW, whose prime mover has almost the same brake power, uses a 4-stroke engine.

An example of this type of engine is the Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged 2-stroke diesel, used in large container ships. It is the most efficient and powerful reciprocating internal combustion engine in the world with a thermal efficiency over 50%. For comparison, the most efficient small four-stroke engines are around 43% thermally-efficient (SAE 900648);[citation needed ] size is an advantage for efficiency due to the increase in the ratio of volume to surface area.

See the external links for an in-cylinder combustion video in a 2-stroke, optically accessible motorcycle engine.

In 1899 John Day simplified Clerk's design into the type of 2 cycle engine that is very widely used today. Day cycle engines are crankcase scavenged and port timed. The crankcase and the part of the cylinder below the exhaust port is used as a pump. The operation of the Day cycle engine begins when the crankshaft is turned so that the piston moves from BDC upward (toward the head) creating a vacuum in the crankcase/cylinder area. The carburetor then feeds the fuel mixture into the crankcase through a reed valve or a rotary disk valve (driven by the engine). There are cast in ducts from the crankcase to the port in the cylinder to provide for intake and another from the exhaust port to the exhaust pipe. The height of the port in relationship to the length of the cylinder is called the "port timing".

On the first upstroke of the engine there would be no fuel inducted into the cylinder as the crankcase was empty. On the downstroke, the piston now compresses the fuel mix, which has lubricated the piston in the cylinder and the bearings due to the fuel mix having oil added to it. As the piston moves downward it first uncovers the exhaust, but on the first stroke there is no burnt fuel to exhaust. As the piston moves downward further, it uncovers the intake port which has a duct that runs to the crankcase. Since the fuel mix in the crankcase is under pressure, the mix moves through the duct and into the cylinder.

Because there is no obstruction in the cylinder of the fuel to move directly out of the exhaust port prior to the piston rising far enough to close the port, early engines used a high domed piston to slow down the flow of fuel. Later the fuel was "resonated" back into the cylinder using an expansion chamber design. When the piston rose close to TDC, a spark ignited the fuel. As the piston is driven downward with power, it first uncovers the exhaust port where the burned fuel is expelled under high pressure and then the intake port where the process has been completed and will keep repeating.

Later engines used a type of porting devised by the Deutz company to improve performance. It was called the Schnurle Reverse Flow system. DKW licensed this design for all their motorcycles. Their DKW RT 125 was one of the first motor vehicles to achieve over 100 mpg as a result.

Internal combustion engines require ignition of the mixture, either by spark ignition (SI) or compression ignition (CI). Before the invention of reliable electrical methods, hot tube and flame methods were used. Experimental engines with laser ignition have been built.

The spark-ignition engine was a refinement of the early engines which used Hot Tube ignition. When Bosch developed the magneto it became the primary system for producing electricity to energize a spark plug. Many small engines still use magneto ignition. Small engines are started by hand cranking using a recoil starter or hand crank. Prior to Charles F. Kettering of Delco's development of the automotive starter all gasoline engined automobiles used a hand crank.

Larger engines typically power their starting motors and ignition systems using the electrical energy stored in a lead-acid battery. The battery's charged state is maintained by an automotive alternator or (previously) a generator which uses engine power to create electrical energy storage.

The battery supplies electrical power for starting when the engine has a starting motor system, and supplies electrical power when the engine is off. The battery also supplies electrical power during rare run conditions where the alternator cannot maintain more than 13.8 volts (for a common 12V automotive electrical system). As alternator voltage falls below 13.8 volts, the lead-acid storage battery increasingly picks up electrical load. During virtually all running conditions, including normal idle conditions, the alternator supplies primary electrical power.

Some systems disable alternator field (rotor) power during wide-open throttle conditions. Disabling the field reduces alternator pulley mechanical loading to nearly zero, maximizing crankshaft power. In this case, the battery supplies all primary electrical power.

Gasoline engines take in a mixture of air and gasoline and compress it by the movement of the piston from bottom dead center to top dead center when the fuel is at maximum compression. The reduction in the size of the swept area of the cylinder and taking into account the volume of the combustion chamber is described by a ratio. Early engines had compression ratios of 6 to 1. As compression ratios were increased, the efficiency of the engine increased as well.

With early induction and ignition systems the compression ratios had to be kept low. With advances in fuel technology and combustion management, high-performance engines can run reliably at 12:1 ratio. With low octane fuel, a problem would occur as the compression ratio increased as the fuel was igniting due to the rise in temperature that resulted. Charles Kettering developed a lead additive which allowed higher compression ratios, which was progressively abandoned for automotive use from the 1970s onward, partly due to lead poisoning concerns.

The fuel mixture is ignited at different progressions of the piston in the cylinder. At low rpm, the spark is timed to occur close to the piston achieving top dead center. In order to produce more power, as rpm rises the spark is advanced sooner during piston movement. The spark occurs while the fuel is still being compressed progressively more as rpm rises.

The necessary high voltage, typically 10,000 volts, is supplied by an induction coil or transformer. The induction coil is a fly-back system, using interruption of electrical primary system current through some type of synchronized interrupter. The interrupter can be either contact points or a power transistor. The problem with this type of ignition is that as RPM increases the availability of electrical energy decreases. This is especially a problem, since the amount of energy needed to ignite a more dense fuel mixture is higher. The result was often a high RPM misfire.

Capacitor discharge ignition was developed. It produces a rising voltage that is sent to the spark plug. CD system voltages can reach 60,000 volts. CD ignitions use step-up transformers. The step-up transformer uses energy stored in a capacitance to generate electric spark. With either system, a mechanical or electrical control system provides a carefully timed high-voltage to the proper cylinder. This spark, via the spark plug, ignites the air-fuel mixture in the engine's cylinders.

For ignition, diesel, PPC and HCCI engines rely solely on the high temperature and pressure created by the engine in its compression process. The compression level that occurs is usually twice or more than a gasoline engine. Diesel engines take in air only, and shortly before peak compression, spray a small quantity of diesel fuel into the cylinder via a fuel injector that allows the fuel to instantly ignite. HCCI type engines take in both air and fuel, but continue to rely on an unaided auto-combustion process, due to higher pressures and temperature. This is also why diesel and HCCI engines are more susceptible to cold-starting issues, although they run just as well in cold weather once started. Light duty diesel engines with indirect injection in automobiles and light trucks employ glowplugs (or other pre-heating: see Cummins ISB#6BT) that pre-heat the combustion chamber just before starting to reduce no-start conditions in cold weather. Most diesels also have a battery and charging system; nevertheless, this system is secondary and is added by manufacturers as a luxury for the ease of starting, turning fuel on and off (which can also be done via a switch or mechanical apparatus), and for running auxiliary electrical components and accessories. Most new engines rely on electrical and electronic engine control units (ECU) that also adjust the combustion process to increase efficiency and reduce emissions.

Surfaces in contact and relative motion to other surfaces require lubrication to reduce wear, noise and increase efficiency by reducing the power wasting in overcoming friction, or to make the mechanism work at all. Also, the lubricant used can reduce excess heat and provide additional cooling to components. At the very least, an engine requires lubrication in the following parts:

Between pistons and cylinders

Small bearings

Big end bearings

Main bearings

Valve gear (The following elements may not be present):

Tappets

Rocker arms

Pushrods

Timing chain or gears. Toothed belts do not require lubrication.

In 2-stroke crankcase scavenged engines, the interior of the crankcase, and therefore the crankshaft, connecting rod and bottom of the pistons are sprayed by the two-stroke oil in the air-fuel-oil mixture which is then burned along with the fuel. The valve train may be contained in a compartment flooded with lubricant so that no oil pump is required.

In a splash lubrication system no oil pump is used. Instead the crankshaft dips into the oil in the sump and due to its high speed, it splashes the crankshaft, connecting rods and bottom of the pistons. The connecting rod big end caps may have an attached scoop to enhance this effect. The valve train may also be sealed in a flooded compartment, or open to the crankshaft in a way that it receives splashed oil and allows it to drain back to the sump. Splash lubrication is common for small 4-stroke engines.

In a forced (also called pressurized) lubrication system, lubrication is accomplished in a closed-loop which carries motor oil to the surfaces serviced by the system and then returns the oil to a reservoir. The auxiliary equipment of an engine is typically not serviced by this loop; for instance, an alternator may use ball bearings sealed with their own lubricant. The reservoir for the oil is usually the sump, and when this is the case, it is called a system. When there is a different oil reservoir the crankcase still catches it, but it is continuously drained by a dedicated pump; this is called a system.

On its bottom, the sump contains an oil intake covered by a mesh filter which is connected to an oil pump then to an oil filter outside the crankcase. From there it is diverted to the crankshaft main bearings and valve train. The crankcase contains at least one oil gallery (a conduit inside a crankcase wall) to which oil is introduced from the oil filter. The main bearings contain a groove through all or half its circumference; the oil enters these grooves from channels connected to the oil gallery. The crankshaft has drillings that take oil from these grooves and deliver it to the big end bearings. All big end bearings are lubricated this way. A single main bearing may provide oil for 0, 1 or 2 big end bearings. A similar system may be used to lubricate the piston, its gudgeon pin and the small end of its connecting rod; in this system, the connecting rod big end has a groove around the crankshaft and a drilling connected to the groove which distributes oil from there to the bottom of the piston and from then to the cylinder.

Other systems are also used to lubricate the cylinder and piston. The connecting rod may have a nozzle to throw an oil jet to the cylinder and bottom of the piston. That nozzle is in movement relative to the cylinder it lubricates, but always pointed towards it or the corresponding piston.

Typically forced lubrication systems have a lubricant flow higher than what is required to lubricate satisfactorily, in order to assist with cooling. Specifically, the lubricant system helps to move heat from the hot engine parts to the cooling liquid (in water-cooled engines) or fins (in air-cooled engines) which then transfer it to the environment. The lubricant must be designed to be chemically stable and maintain suitable viscosities within the temperature range it encounters in the engine.

Common cylinder configurations include the straight or inline configuration, the more compact V configuration, and the wider but smoother flat or boxer configuration. Aircraft engines can also adopt a radial configuration, which allows more effective cooling. More unusual configurations such as the H, U, X, and W have also been used.

Some popular cylinder configurations:
a - straight
b - V
c - opposed
d - W

Multiple cylinder engines have their valve train and crankshaft configured so that pistons are at different parts of their cycle. It is desirable to have the pistons' cycles uniformly spaced (this is called even firing) especially in forced induction engines; this reduces torque pulsations and makes inline engines with more than 3 cylinders statically balanced in its primary forces. However, some engine configurations require odd firing to achieve better balance than what is possible with even firing. For instance, a 4-stroke I2 engine has better balance when the angle between the crankpins is 180° because the pistons move in opposite directions and inertial forces partially cancel, but this gives an odd firing pattern where one cylinder fires 180° of crankshaft rotation after the other, then no cylinder fires for 540°. With an even firing pattern, the pistons would move in unison and the associated forces would add.

Multiple crankshaft configurations do not necessarily need a cylinder head at all because they can instead have a piston at each end of the cylinder called an opposed piston design. Because fuel inlets and outlets are positioned at opposed ends of the cylinder, one can achieve uniflow scavenging, which, as in the four-stroke engine is efficient over a wide range of engine speeds. Thermal efficiency is improved because of a lack of cylinder heads. This design was used in the Junkers Jumo 205 diesel aircraft engine, using two crankshafts at either end of a single bank of cylinders, and most remarkably in the Napier Deltic diesel engines. These used three crankshafts to serve three banks of double-ended cylinders arranged in an equilateral triangle with the crankshafts at the corners. It was also used in single-bank locomotive engines, and is still used in marine propulsion engines and marine auxiliary generators.

P-V diagram for the ideal diesel cycle. The cycle follows the numbers 1-4 in clockwise direction.

Most truck and automotive diesel engines use a cycle reminiscent of a four-stroke cycle, but with temperature increase by compression causing ignition, rather than needing a separate ignition system. This variation is called the diesel cycle. In the diesel cycle, diesel fuel is injected directly into the cylinder so that combustion occurs at constant pressure, as the piston moves.

The Otto cycle is the most common cycle for most cars' internal combustion engines that use gasoline as a fuel. It consists of the same major steps as described for the four-stroke engine: Intake, compression, ignition, expansion and exhaust.

In 1879, Nicolaus Otto manufactured and sold a double expansion engine (the double and triple expansion principles had ample usage in steam engines), with two small cylinders at both sides of a low-pressure larger cylinder, where a second expansion of exhaust stroke gas took place; the owner returned it, alleging poor performance. In 1906, the concept was incorporated in a car built by EHV ( Eisenhuth Horseless Vehicle Company); and in the 21st century Ilmor designed and successfully tested a 5-stroke double expansion internal combustion engine, with high power output and low SFC (Specific Fuel Consumption).

The six-stroke engine was invented in 1883. Four kinds of six-stroke engines use a regular piston in a regular cylinder (Griffin six-stroke, Bajulaz six-stroke, Velozeta six-stroke and Crower six-stroke), firing every three crankshaft revolutions. These systems capture the waste heat of the four-stroke Otto cycle with an injection of air or water.

The Beare Head and "piston charger" engines operate as opposed-piston engines, two pistons in a single cylinder, firing every two revolutions rather than every four like a four-stroke engine.

The very first internal combustion engines did not compress the mixture. The first part of the piston downstroke drew in a fuel-air mixture, then the inlet valve closed and, in the remainder of the down-stroke, the fuel-air mixture fired. The exhaust valve opened for the piston upstroke. These attempts at imitating the principle of a steam engine were very inefficient. There are a number of variations of these cycles, most notably the Atkinson and Miller cycles.

Split-cycle engines separate the four strokes of intake, compression, combustion and exhaust into two separate but paired cylinders. The first cylinder is used for intake and compression. The compressed air is then transferred through a crossover passage from the compression cylinder into the second cylinder, where combustion and exhaust occur. A split-cycle engine is really an air compressor on one side with a combustion chamber on the other.

Previous split-cycle engines have had two major problems-poor breathing (volumetric efficiency) and low thermal efficiency. However, new designs are being introduced that seek to address these problems. The Scuderi Engine addresses the breathing problem by reducing the clearance between the piston and the cylinder head through various turbocharging techniques. The Scuderi design requires the use of outwardly opening valves that enable the piston to move very close to the cylinder head without the interference of the valves. Scuderi addresses the low thermal efficiency via firing after top dead center (ATDC).

Firing ATDC can be accomplished by using high-pressure air in the transfer passage to create sonic flow and high turbulence in the power cylinder.

Jet engines use a number of rows of fan blades to compress air which then enters a combustor where it is mixed with fuel (typically JP fuel) and then ignited. The burning of the fuel raises the temperature of the air which is then exhausted out of the engine creating thrust. A modern turbofan engine can operate at as high as 48% efficiency.

There are six sections to a turbofan engine:

A gas turbine compresses air and uses it to turn a turbine. It is essentially a jet engine which directs its output to a shaft. There are three stages to a turbine: 1) air is drawn through a compressor where the temperature rises due to compression, 2) fuel is added in the combuster, and 3) hot air is exhausted through turbine blades which rotate a shaft connected to the compressor.

A gas turbine is a rotary machine similar in principle to a steam turbine and it consists of three main components: a compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine. The temperature of the air, after being compressed in the compressor, is increased by burning fuel in it. The heated air and the products of combustion expand in a turbine, producing work output. About of the work drives the compressor: the rest (about ) is available as useful work output.

A gas turbine is a rotary machine somewhat similar in principle to a steam turbine. It consists of three main components: compressor, combustion chamber, and turbine. The air is compressed by the compressor where a temperature rise occurs. The temperature of the compressed air is further increased by combustion of injected fuel in the combustion chamber which expands the air. This energy rotates the turbine which powers the compressor via a mechanical coupling. The hot gases are then exhausted to provide thrust.

Gas turbine cycle engines employ a continuous combustion system where compression, combustion, and expansion occur simultaneously at different places in the engine-giving continuous power. Notably, the combustion takes place at constant pressure, rather than with the Otto cycle, constant volume.

The Wankel rotary cycle. The shaft turns three times for each rotation of the rotor around the lobe and once for each orbital revolution around the eccentric shaft.

The Wankel engine (rotary engine) does not have piston strokes. It operates with the same separation of phases as the four-stroke engine with the phases taking place in separate locations in the engine. In thermodynamic terms it follows the Otto engine cycle, so may be thought of as a "four-phase" engine. While it is true that three power strokes typically occur per rotor revolution, due to the 3:1 revolution ratio of the rotor to the eccentric shaft, only one power stroke per shaft revolution actually occurs. The drive (eccentric) shaft rotates once during every power stroke instead of twice (crankshaft), as in the Otto cycle, giving it a greater power-to-weight ratio than piston engines. This type of engine was most notably used in the Mazda RX-8, the earlier RX-7, and other vehicle models. The engine is also used in unmanned aerial vehicles, where the small size and weight and the high power-to-weight ratio are advantageous.

Forced induction is the process of delivering compressed air to the intake of an internal combustion engine. A forced induction engine uses a gas compressor to increase the pressure, temperature and density of the air. An engine without forced induction is considered a naturally aspirated engine.

Forced induction is used in the automotive and aviation industry to increase engine power and efficiency. It particularly helps aviation engines, as they need to operate at high altitude.

Forced induction is achieved by a supercharger, where the compressor is directly powered from the engine shaft or, in the turbocharger, from a turbine powered by the engine exhaust.

All internal combustion engines depend on combustion of a chemical fuel, typically with oxygen from the air (though it is possible to inject nitrous oxide to do more of the same thing and gain a power boost). The combustion process typically results in the production of a great quantity of thermal energy, as well as the production of steam and carbon dioxide and other chemicals at very high temperature; the temperature reached is determined by the chemical make up of the fuel and oxidizers (see stoichiometry), as well as by the compression and other factors.

Presently, fuels used include:

Even fluidized metal powders and explosives have seen some use. Engines that use gases for fuel are called gas engines and those that use liquid hydrocarbons are called oil engines; however, gasoline engines are also often colloquially referred to as "gas engines" (" petrol engines" outside North America).

The main limitations on fuels are that it must be easily transportable through the fuel system to the combustion chamber, and that the fuel releases sufficient energy in the form of heat upon combustion to make practical use of the engine.

Hydrogen could eventually replace conventional fossil fuels in traditional internal combustion engines. Alternatively fuel cell technology may come to deliver its promise and the use of the internal combustion engines could even be phased out.

Although there are multiple ways of producing free hydrogen, those methods require converting combustible molecules into hydrogen or consuming electric energy. Unless that electricity is produced from a renewable source-and is not required for other purposes-hydrogen does not solve any energy crisis. In many situations the disadvantage of hydrogen, relative to carbon fuels, is its storage. Liquid hydrogen has extremely low density (14 times lower than water) and requires extensive insulation-whilst gaseous hydrogen requires heavy tankage. Even when liquefied, hydrogen has a higher specific energy but the volumetric energetic storage is still roughly five times lower than gasoline. However, the energy density of hydrogen is considerably higher than that of electric batteries, making it a serious contender as an energy carrier to replace fossil fuels. The 'Hydrogen on Demand' process (see direct borohydride fuel cell) creates hydrogen as needed, but has other issues, such as the high price of the sodium borohydride that is the raw material.

One-cylinder gasoline engine, c. 1910

Since air is plentiful at the surface of the earth, the oxidizer is typically atmospheric oxygen, which has the advantage of not being stored within the vehicle. This increases the power-to-weight and power-to-volume ratios. Other materials are used for special purposes, often to increase power output or to allow operation under water or in space.

Compressed air has been commonly used in torpedoes.

Compressed oxygen, as well as some compressed air, was used in the Japanese Type 93 torpedo. Some submarines carry pure oxygen. Rockets very often use liquid oxygen.

Nitromethane is added to some racing and model fuels to increase power and control combustion.

Nitrous oxide has been used-with extra gasoline-in tactical aircraft, and in specially equipped cars to allow short bursts of added power from engines that otherwise run on gasoline and air. It is also used in the Burt Rutan rocket spacecraft.

Hydrogen peroxide power was under development for German World War II submarines. It may have been used in some non-nuclear submarines, and was used on some rocket engines (notably the Black Arrow and the Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter).

Other chemicals such as chlorine or fluorine have been used experimentally, but have not been found practical.

Cooling is required to remove excessive heat-high temperature can cause engine failure, usually from wear (due to high-temperature-induced failure of lubrication), cracking or warping. Two most common forms of engine cooling are air-cooled and water-cooled. Most modern automotive engines are both water and air-cooled, as the water/liquid-coolant is carried to air-cooled fins and/or fans, whereas larger engines may be singularly water-cooled as they are stationary and have a constant supply of water through water-mains or fresh-water, while most power tool engines and other small engines are air-cooled. Some engines (air or water-cooled) also have an oil cooler. In some engines, especially for turbine engine blade cooling and liquid rocket engine cooling, fuel is used as a coolant, as it is simultaneously preheated before injecting it into a combustion chamber.

Hand-cranking a boat diesel motor in Inle Lake (Myanmar)

Internal combustion engines must have their cycles started. In reciprocating engines this is accomplished by turning the crankshaft (Wankel Rotor Shaft) which induces the cycles of intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust. The first engines were started with a turn of their flywheels, while the first vehicle (the Daimler Reitwagen) was started with a hand crank. All ICE engined automobiles were started with hand cranks until Charles Kettering developed the electric starter for automobiles. This method is now the most widely used, even among non-automobiles.

Two-wheeled vehicles may have their engines started in one of four ways:

By pedaling, as on a bicycle

By pushing the vehicle and then engaging the clutch, known as "run-and-bump starting"

By kicking downward on a single pedal, known as "kick starting"

By an electric starter, as in cars

There are also starters where a spring is compressed by a crank motion and then used to start an engine.

Some small engines use a pull-rope mechanism called "recoil starting", as the rope rewinds itself after it has been pulled out to start the engine. This method is commonly used in pushed lawn mowers and other settings where only a small amount of torque is needed to turn an engine over.

Turbine engines are frequently started by an electric motor or by compressed air.

Engine types vary greatly in a number of different ways:

Once ignited and burnt, the combustion products-hot gases-have more available thermal energy than the original compressed fuel-air mixture (which had higher chemical energy). This available energy is manifested as a higher temperature and pressure that can be converted into kinetic energy by the engine. In a reciprocating engine, the high-pressure gases inside the cylinders drive the engine's pistons.

Once the available energy has been removed, the remaining hot gases are vented (often by opening a valve or exposing the exhaust outlet) and this allows the piston to return to its previous position (top dead center, or TDC). The piston can then proceed to the next phase of its cycle, which varies between engines. Any thermal energy that is not translated into work is normally considered a waste product and is removed from the engine either by an air or liquid cooling system.

Internal combustion engines are considered heat engines (since the release of chemical energy in combustion has the same effect as heat transfer into the engine) and as such their theoretical efficiency can be approximated by idealized thermodynamic cycles. The thermal efficiency of a theoretical cycle cannot exceed that of the Carnot cycle, whose efficiency is determined by the difference between the lower and upper operating temperatures of the engine. The upper operating temperature of an engine is limited by two main factors; the thermal operating limits of the materials, and the auto-ignition resistance of the fuel. All metals and alloys have a thermal operating limit, and there is significant research into ceramic materials that can be made with greater thermal stability and desirable structural properties. Higher thermal stability allows for a greater temperature difference between the lower (ambient) and upper operating temperatures, hence greater thermodynamic efficiency. Also, as the cylinder temperature rises, the fuel becomes more prone to auto-ignition. This is caused when the cylinder temperature nears the flash point of the charge. At this point, ignition can spontaneously occur before the spark plug fires, causing excessive cylinder pressures. Auto-ignition can be mitigated by using fuels with high auto-ignition resistance ( octane rating), however it still puts an upper bound on the allowable peak cylinder temperature.

The thermodynamic limits assume that the engine is operating under ideal conditions: a frictionless world, ideal gases, perfect insulators, and operation for infinite time. Real world applications introduce complexities that reduce efficiency. For example, a real engine runs best at a specific load, termed its power band. The engine in a car cruising on a highway is usually operating significantly below its ideal load, because it is designed for the higher loads required for rapid acceleration.[citation needed ] In addition, factors such as wind resistance reduce overall system efficiency. Vehicle fuel economy is measured in miles per gallon or in liters per 100 kilometers. The volume of hydrocarbon assumes a standard energy content.

Even when aided with turbochargers and stock efficiency aids, most engines retain an average efficiency of about 18-20%. However, the latest technologies in Formula One engines have seen a boost in thermal efficiency past 50%. There are many inventions aimed at increasing the efficiency of IC engines. In general, practical engines are always compromised by trade-offs between different properties such as efficiency, weight, power, heat, response, exhaust emissions, or noise. Sometimes economy also plays a role in not only the cost of manufacturing the engine itself, but also manufacturing and distributing the fuel. Increasing the engine's efficiency brings better fuel economy but only if the fuel cost per energy content is the same.

For stationary and shaft engines including propeller engines, fuel consumption is measured by calculating the brake specific fuel consumption, which measures the mass flow rate of fuel consumption divided by the power produced.

For internal combustion engines in the form of jet engines, the power output varies drastically with airspeed and a less variable measure is used: thrust specific fuel consumption (TSFC), which is the mass of propellant needed to generate impulses that is measured in either pound force-hour or the grams of propellant needed to generate an impulse that measures one kilonewton-second.

For rockets, TSFC can be used, but typically other equivalent measures are traditionally used, such as specific impulse and effective exhaust velocity.

Internal combustion engines such as reciprocating internal combustion engines produce air pollution emissions, due to incomplete combustion of carbonaceous fuel. The main derivatives of the process are carbon dioxide , water and some soot-also called particulate matter (PM). The effects of inhaling particulate matter have been studied in humans and animals and include asthma, lung cancer, cardiovascular issues, and premature death. There are, however, some additional products of the combustion process that include nitrogen oxides and sulfur and some uncombusted hydrocarbons, depending on the operating conditions and the fuel-air ratio.

Carbon dioxide emissions from internal combustion engines (particularly ones using fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel) contribute to human-induced climate change. Increasing the engine's fuel efficiency can reduce, but not eliminate, the amount of emissions as carbon-based fuel combustion produces . Since removing from engine exhaust is impractical, there is increasing interest in alternatives. Sustainable fuels such as biofuels, synfuels, and electric motors powered by batteries are examples.

Not all of the fuel is completely consumed by the combustion process. A small amount of fuel is present after combustion, and some of it reacts to form oxygenates, such as formaldehyde or acetaldehyde, or hydrocarbons not originally present in the input fuel mixture. Incomplete combustion usually results from insufficient oxygen to achieve the perfect stoichiometric ratio. The flame is "quenched" by the relatively cool cylinder walls, leaving behind unreacted fuel that is expelled with the exhaust. When running at lower speeds, quenching is commonly observed in diesel (compression ignition) engines that run on natural gas. Quenching reduces efficiency and increases knocking, sometimes causing the engine to stall. Incomplete combustion also leads to the production of carbon monoxide (CO). Further chemicals released are benzene and 1,3-butadiene that are also hazardous air pollutants.

Increasing the amount of air in the engine reduces emissions of incomplete combustion products, but also promotes reaction between oxygen and nitrogen in the air to produce nitrogen oxides (). is hazardous to both plant and animal health, and leads to the production of ozone (). Ozone is not emitted directly; rather, it is a secondary air pollutant, produced in the atmosphere by the reaction of and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight. Ground-level ozone is harmful to human health and the environment. Though the same chemical substance, ground-level ozone should not be confused with stratospheric ozone, or the ozone layer, which protects the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays.

Carbon fuels containing sulfur produce sulfur monoxides (SO) and sulfur dioxide () contributing to acid rain.

In the United States, nitrogen oxides, PM, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and ozone, are regulated as criteria air pollutants under the Clean Air Act to levels where human health and welfare are protected. Other pollutants, such as benzene and 1,3-butadiene, are regulated as hazardous air pollutants whose emissions must be lowered as much as possible depending on technological and practical considerations.

, carbon monoxide and other pollutants are frequently controlled via exhaust gas recirculation which returns some of the exhaust back into the engine intake. Catalytic converters are used to convert exhaust chemicals to (a greenhouse gas), (water vapour, also a greenhouse gas) and (nitrogen).

Significant contributions to noise pollution are made by internal combustion engines. Automobile and truck traffic operating on highways and street systems produce noise, as do aircraft flights due to jet noise, particularly supersonic-capable aircraft. Rocket engines create the most intense noise.

Internal combustion engines continue to consume fuel and emit pollutants while idling. Idling is reduced by stop-start systems.

A good way to estimate the mass of carbon dioxide that is released when one litre of diesel fuel (or gasoline) is combusted can be found as follows:

As a good approximation the chemical formula of diesel is CH. In reality diesel is a mixture of different molecules. As carbon has a molar mass of 12 g/mol and hydrogen (atomic) has a molar mass of about 1 g/mol, the fraction by weight of carbon in diesel is roughly .

The reaction of diesel combustion is given by:

2CH + 3n ⇌ 2n + 2n

Carbon dioxide has a molar mass of 44 g/mol as it consists of 2 atoms of oxygen (16 g/mol) and 1 atom of carbon (12 g/mol). So 12 g of carbon yields 44 g of carbon dioxide.

Diesel has a density of 0.838 kg per litre.

Putting everything together the mass of carbon dioxide that is produced by burning 1 litre of diesel can be calculated as:

The figure obtained with this estimation is close to the values found in the literature.

For gasoline, with a density of 0.75 kg/L and a ratio of carbon to hydrogen atoms of about 6 to 14, the estimated value of carbon dioxide emission from burning 1 litre of gasoline is:

The term parasitic loss is often applied to devices that take energy from the engine in order to enhance the engine's ability to create more energy or convert energy to motion. In the internal combustion engine, almost every mechanical component, including the drivetrain, causes parasitic loss and could thus be characterized as a parasitic load.

Bearings, oil pumps, piston rings, valve springs, flywheels, transmissions, driveshafts, and differentials all act as parasitic loads that rob the system of power. These parasitic loads can be divided into two categories: those inherent to the working of the engine and those drivetrain losses incurred in the systems that transfer power from the engine to the road (such as the transmission, driveshaft, differentials and axles).

For example, the former category (engine parasitic loads) includes the oil pump used to lubricate the engine, which is a necessary parasite that consumes power from the engine (its host). Another example of an engine parasitic load is a supercharger, which derives its power from the engine and creates more power for the engine. The power that the supercharger consumes is parasitic loss and is usually expressed in kilowatt or horsepower. While the power that the supercharger consumes in comparison to what it generates is small, it is still measurable or calculable. One of the desirable features of a turbocharger over a supercharger is the lower parasitic loss of the former.

Drivetrain parasitic losses include both steady state and dynamic loads. Steady state loads occur at constant speeds and may originate in discrete components such as the torque converter, the transmission oil pump, and/or clutch drag, and in seal/bearing drag, churning of lubricant and gear windage/ friction found throughout the system. Dynamic loads occur under acceleration and are caused by inertia of rotating components and/or increased friction.

While rules of thumb such as a 15% power loss from drivetrain parasitic loads have been commonly repeated, the actual loss of energy due to parasitic loads varies between systems. It can be influenced by powertrain design, lubricant type and temperature and many other factors. In automobiles, drivetrain loss can be quantified by measuring the difference between power measured by an engine dynamometer and a chassis dynamometer. However, this method is primarily useful for measuring steady state loads and may not accurately reflect losses due to dynamic loads. More advanced methods can be used in a laboratory setting, such as measuring in-cylinder pressure measurements, flow rate and temperature at certain points, and testing of individual parts or sub-assemblies to determine friction and pumping losses.

For example, in a dynamometer test by Hot Rod magazine, a Ford Mustang equipped with a modified 357ci small-block Ford V8 engine and an automatic transmission had a measured drivetrain power loss averaging 33%. In the same test, a Buick equipped with a modified 455ci V8 engine and a 4-speed manual transmission was measured to have an average drivetrain power loss of 21%.

Laboratory testing of a heavy-duty diesel engine determined that 1.3% of the fuel energy input was lost to parasitic loads of engine accessories such as water and oil pumps.

Automotive engineers and tuners commonly make design choices that reduce parasitic loads in order to improve efficiency and power output. These may involve the choice of major engine components or systems, such as the use of dry sump lubrication system over a wet sump system. Alternately, this can be effected through substitution of minor components available as aftermarket modifications, such as exchanging a directly engine-driven fan for one equipped with a fan clutch or an electric fan. Another modification to reduce parasitic loss, usually seen in track-only cars, is the replacement of an engine-driven water pump for an electrical water pump. The reduction in parasitic loss from these changes may be due to reduced friction or many other variables that cause the design to be more efficient.[citation needed ]

Anyebe, E.A (2009). Combustion Engine and Operations, Automobile Technology Handbook. Vol. 2.

Denton, T. (2011). Automobile Mechanical and Electrical Systems. Automobile Mechanical and Electrical Systems: Automotive Technology : Vehicle Maintenance and Repair. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-136-27038-3.

Heywood, J. (2018). Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals 2E. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 978-1-260-11611-3.

Ricardo, Harry (1931). The High-Speed Internal Combustion Engine.

Yamagata, H. (2005). The Science and Technology of Materials in Automotive Engines. Woodhead Publishing in materials The science and technology of materials in automotive engines. Elsevier Science. ISBN 978-1-84569-085-4.

Patents:

ES 433850, Ubierna Laciana, "Perfeccionamientos en Motores de Explosion, con Cinco Tiem-Pos y Doble Expansion", published 1976-11-01

ES 230551, Ortuno Garcia Jose, "Un Nuevo Motor de Explosion", published 1957-03-01

ES 249247, Ortuno Garcia Jose, "Motor de Carreras Distintas", published 1959-09-01

Hardenberg, Horst O. (1999). The Middle Ages of the Internal Combustion Engine. US: Society of Automotive Engineers.

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An internal combustion engine ( ICE or IC engine) is a heat engine in which the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer (usually air) in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit.

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the machine gun was invented by Hiram Maxim in 1884. This event mainly affected Europe and North america before it spread globally.

A machine gun was a firearm designed to fire multiple rounds automatically with the single pull of a trigger. The machine gun was developed in the late 19th century and has profoundly altered the character of modern warfare.

the invention of the machine gun changed military tactics, the way wars were fought. Plus it changed how soldiers set up defenses and influenced military strategies all around the world

https://www.britannica.com/technology/machine-gun

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machine gun, automatic weapon of small calibre that is capable of sustained rapid fire. Most machine guns are belt-fed weapons that fire from 500 to 1,000 rounds per minute and will continue to fire as long as the trigger is held back or until the supply of ammunition is exhausted. The machine gun was developed in the late 19th century and has profoundly altered the character of modern warfare.

Modern machine guns are classified into three groups. The light machine gun, also called the squad automatic weapon, is equipped with a bipod and is operated by one soldier; it usually has a box-type magazine and is chambered for the small-calibre, intermediate-power ammunition fired by the assault rifles of its military unit. The medium machine gun, or general-purpose machine gun, is belt-fed, mounted on a bipod or tripod, and fires full-power rifle ammunition. Through World War II the term " heavy machine gun" designated a water-cooled machine gun that was belt-fed, handled by a special squad of several soldiers, and mounted on a tripod. Since 1945 the term has designated an automatic weapon firing ammunition larger than that used in ordinary combat rifles; the most widely used calibre is .50 inch or 12.7 mm, although a Soviet heavy machine gun fired a 14.5-millimetre round.

From the introduction of firearms in the late Middle Ages, attempts were made to design a weapon that would fire more than one shot without reloading, typically by a cluster or row of barrels fired in sequence. In 1718 James Puckle in London patented a machine gun that was actually produced; a model of it is in the Tower of London. Its chief feature, a revolving cylinder that fed rounds into the gun's chamber, was a basic step toward the automatic weapon; what prevented its success was the clumsy and undependable flintlock ignition. The introduction of the percussion cap in the 19th century led to the invention of numerous machine guns in the United States, several of which were employed in the American Civil War. In all of these either the cylinder or a cluster of barrels was hand-cranked. The most successful was the Gatling gun, which in its later version incorporated the modern cartridge, containing bullet, propellant, and means of ignition.

The introduction of smokeless powder in the 1880s made it possible to convert the hand-cranked machine gun into a truly automatic weapon, primarily because smokeless powder's even combustion made it possible to harness the recoil so as to work the bolt, expel the spent cartridge, and reload. Hiram Stevens Maxim of the United States was the first inventor to incorporate this effect in a weapon design. The Maxim machine gun (c. 1884) was quickly followed by others-the Hotchkiss, Lewis, Browning, Madsen, Mauser, and other guns. Some of these utilized another property of the even burning of smokeless powder: small amounts of the combustion gas were diverted through a port to drive a piston or lever to open the breech as each round was fired, admitting the next round. As a result, during World War I the battlefield was from the outset dominated by the machine gun, generally belt-fed, water-cooled, and of a calibre matching that of the rifle. Except for synchronizing with aircraft propellers, the machine gun remained little changed throughout World War I and into World War II. Since then, innovations such as sheet-metal bodies and air-cooled, quick-changing barrels have made machine guns lighter and more reliable and quick-firing, but they still operate under the same principles as in the days of Hiram Maxim.

Most machine guns employ the gas generated by the explosion of the cartridge to drive the mechanism that introduces the new round in the chamber. The machine gun thus requires no outside source of power, instead using the energy released by the burning propellant in a cartridge to feed, load, lock, and fire each round and to extract and eject the empty cartridge case. This automatic operation may be accomplished by any of three ways: blowback, recoil, and gas operation.

In simple blowback operation, the empty cartridge case is hurled backward by the explosion of the cartridge and thereby pushes back the bolt, or breechblock, which in turn compresses a spring and is returned to the firing position upon that spring's recoil. The basic problem involved in blowback is to control the rearward motion of the bolt so that the gun's cycle of operation (i.e., loading, firing, and ejection) takes place correctly. In recoil operation, the bolt is locked to the barrel immediately after a round is fired; both the bolt and barrel recoil, but the barrel is then returned forward by its own spring while the bolt is held to the rear by the locking mechanism until a fresh round has fallen into place in the opened breech.

More common than either of these two methods is gas operation. In this method, the energy required to operate the gun is obtained from the pressure of gas tapped off from the barrel after each cartridge explodes. In a typical gas-operated machine gun, an opening or port is provided in the side of the barrel at a point somewhere between the breech and the muzzle. When the bullet has passed this opening, some of the high-pressure gases behind it are tapped off through the hole and operate a piston or some similar device for converting the pressure of the powder gases to a thrust. This thrust is then used through a suitable mechanism to provide the energy necessary for performing the automatic functions required for sustained fire: loading, firing, and ejection.

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Machine gun | History, Description, & Facts

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Machine gun, automatic weapon of small caliber that is capable of sustained rapid fire. Machine guns can continue to fire as long as the trigger is held back or until the supply of ammunition is exhausted. The machine gun was developed in the late 19th century and has profoundly altered the character of modern warfare.

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this event first affected places like the U.S. and Europe, helping people travel faster and farther then never before.

The invention of the first airplane by the wright brothers in 1903 changed the world in many ways. Over time, airplanes made it easier to connect to other countries, like shipping goods, and even in war. this invention started air travel which now millions of people use daily to go on vacation, business reasons, and a lot more.

https://airandspace.si.edu/explore/stories/wright-brothers

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The Wright brothers-you may have heard of them. But who exactly were they and what did they do?

The invention of the airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright is one of the great stories in American history. The Wright brothers' invention not only solved a long-studied technical problem, but helped create an entirely new world.

Creating the First Heavier-Than-Air Powered Aircraft

The desire to fly is both ancient and universal. For centuries, humans took to the sky-by balloons, kites, and gliders. The Wrights took flight to the next level with the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft. At the center of the story of the first heavier-than-air powered flight are two talented, yet modest, Midwestern bicycle shop owners who created a world-changing technology: the Wright brothers.
Before They Were Aviators
The success of the 1903 Wright Flyer is perhaps one of the most iconic stories from American history. But how did Orville and Wilbur Wright end up as pioneering aeronautical engineers? Even before they got interested in flight, the Wrights' unique combination of engineering knowledge and skill, creative abilities, and personality traits were evident in the business pursuits they took on in the years before they began their groundbreaking aeronautical research.
About the Wrights The 1903 Wright Flyer in 3D
See the Flyer in our collection

Orville and Wilbur weren't the first in their family to participate in a historical moment. In fact, the Wright brothers' family story parallels many threads and movements in American history. Perhaps most importantly, the Wrights' family helped to shape them into the enterprising aeronautical engineers we know them as today.
Meet the entire Wright family Meet the Wright's sister, Katharine
Welcome to the Aerial Age

The Wright brothers' invention of the airplane, starting with the 1903 Wright Flyer, truly changed the world. Imagining what this new world would be like began as soon as the first airplanes took to the air in the early 1900s.
The Airplane Takes to the Battlefield
The 1909 Wright Military Flyer is the world's first military airplane. In 1908, the U.S. Army Signal Corps sought competitive bids for a two-seat observation aircraft. On June 3, 1909, the Wrights returned to Fort Myer with a new airplane to complete the trials begun in 1908, that were cut short by a crash. Satisfying all requirements, the Army purchased the airplane for $30,000, and conducted flight training with it at nearby College Park, Maryland, and at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, in 1910. It was donated to the Smithsonian in 1911.
See the Wright Military Flyer in our collection How the military got its wings The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age Virtual Tour Can't Visit In-Person?
Take a virtual tour of the Museum's exhibition The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age! At the center of the story and the heart of the gallery is the original 1903 Wright Flyer, one of the most iconic artifacts in the Smithsonian's collection.
Take virtual tour Learn more about the exhibition

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Learn about the inventors of the first heavier-than-air powered aircraft.

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The Russian Revolution mainly affected Russia, but it also sparked communist movement in China and Cuba.

the russian revolution was a series of events in 1917 that led to the overthrow of the Tsar and the rise of the Bolsheviks, who established a communist government in russia.

the russian revolution ended the monarchy, established a communist government, inspired global communist movements, and changed the economy to state control.

https://www.britannica.com/summary/Russian-Revolution

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Russian Revolution of 1917, Revolution that overthrew the imperial government and placed the Bolsheviks in power. Increasing governmental corruption, the reactionary policies of Tsar Nicholas II, and catastrophic Russian losses in World War I contributed to widespread dissatisfaction and economic hardship. In February 1917 riots over food scarcity broke out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). When the army joined the rebels, Nicholas was forced to abdicate. A provisional government, headed by Georgy Lvov, was appointed in March and tried to continue Russia's participation in World War I, but it was opposed by the powerful Petrograd workers' soviet, which favoured Russian withdrawal from the war. Other soviets were formed in major cities and towns, choosing members from factories and military units. The soviet movement was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionary Party, followed by the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Between March and October, the provisional government was reorganized four times; Aleksandr Kerensky became its head in July; he survived a coup attempt by Lavr Kornilov but was unable to halt Russia's slide into political and military chaos. By September the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, had achieved majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets and won increasing support among the hungry urban workers and soldiers. In October they staged a nearly bloodless coup (the "October Revolution"), occupying government buildings and strategic points. Kerensky tried unsuccessfully to organize resistance, then fled the country. The congress of soviets approved the formation of a new government composed mainly of Bolsheviks. See also April Theses; Aleksandr Guchkov; July Days; Russian Civil War.

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Russian Revolution of 1917, Revolution that overthrew the imperial government and placed the Bolsheviks in power. Increasing governmental corruption, the reactionary policies of Tsar Nicholas II, and catastrophic Russian losses in World War I contributed to widespread dissatisfaction and economic hardship. In February 1917 riots over food scarcity broke out in Petrograd (St.

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The battle of somme happened in 1916 during WW1, it mainly affected Europe, united kingdom, and germany.

This was one of the deadliest battles and over a million soldiers were wounded or hurt. the goal was to break through german lines, but it didn't change much. it showed how terrible war had become and led to better use of weapons like tanks. Today, it shows people how important peace is and what having a war costs.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-happened-on-the-first-day-of-the-battle-of-the-somme

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At 7:30 a.m. on the 1st of July 1916, whistles rang out across Allied lines near the River Somme in Northern France. Thousands of men clambered out of their trenches and slowly began to advance towards German lines. Allied artillery had been pounding the German defences for a week hoping to cut their barbed wire, destroy their dugouts, and provide a long-awaited breakthrough on the western front. But there was a problem. The Germans were dug in deep and many of the British shells were either duds which failed to explode or shrapnel shells which did little to no damage. Allied soldiers anticipated limited resistance, but when the barrage lifted German machine gunners emerged from their intact shelters and mowed down the oncoming British infantry in their thousands.

That first day of the Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest day in British military history with over 57,000 casualties. For many people the story of the Somme ends there with unmitigated disaster, but the battle was by no means over. Britain would go on to take another 360,000 casualties the French over 200,000 and the Germans over 500,000 in a fight which would come to define First World War. If you truly want to understand the Battle of the Somme, you need to look at the fighting beyond the first day.

Before we do that though, a reminder to subscribe to the Imperial War Museums YouTube channel for more videos just like this every two weeks.

Of course, the Battle of the Somme is not just the first of July 1916. There's 142 days of action on the Somme and the rest of the battle is not like the first day. Had it been like the first day the British army would almost ceased to have existed.

To understand the rest of the battle, we first need to understand why the battle was being fought in the first place. 1916 was set to be a big year for the Allies with planned offensives on the Western, Eastern, Italian, and Balkan fronts.

Well, initially the Somme is supposed to be a French-led campaign, so the French army under Joffre have decided to fight on the Somme because at the Somme River the British and French armies meet. Haig however wants really to fight in Flanders, but that doesn't cut any ice with the French and the French are the senior partner here so the French drive allied strategy.

But when the Germans attacked at Verdun in February the French army was sucked in to defend it which changed the allied plans.

What happens is that switches the emphasis to the Battle of Somme to be primarily a British-led offensive. Haig, he wants to attack in the middle of August because by that time he'd have trained his army. Joffre says 'No way we cannot wait for this. We need to attack by the 1st of July at the latest'. So, Haig is now fighting a major battle on ground not of his own choosing and at a time not of his own choosing.

The Somme simply had to be fought. Mainly to take pressure off the French, but also to start wearing down the German army as part of grand allied strategy. This in part explains the disaster of the first day, but more importantly, it explains why fighting continued after that point despite British unpreparedness.

The British army is just not really ready for this battle. From Haig down people lack experience. It's almost like turning a corner shop into Sainsbury's overnight. Where have you got the experience at all levels to run that organization and to make that organization function properly? You haven't, you have to learn. You have to learn on a job and unfortunately learning on the job at war fighting a major battle means you are going to take casualties unfortunately.

Remember this is not the British army of old. It's primarily made up of Kitchener's volunteers who signed up in 1914 and alongside them are troops of the Empire Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians and West Indians all played their part on the Somme.

Australians famously at Poziers, they actually lose as many men at Poziers as they did in the Gallipoli campaign. There are also Indian cavalry. Indian cavalry make an attack and charge German machine guns near High Wood relatively successfully but there's no breakthrough. Behind the lines are men of the British West Indies Regiment. Unfortunately, not allowed to fight on the Western Front but they were doing great logistical work moving that ammunition forward for the artillery to keep the guns in action, digging trenches dugouts, forming camps for the men coming out in and out of the line, really important contribution from them as well.

So what was the situation like after the first day? Well, these were the Allied objectives on that day and this is where they actually got to after two weeks. North of the Roman road from Albert to Bapaume it had been a disaster, south of the road there had been some progress made, but the only places of real success were where the British could make use of French heavy guns and in fact below the river Somme French troops had done brilliantly, exceeding their objectives and exposing the clear differences between themselves and the green British army.

The next phase of the operation was focused south of the Roman road in an attempt to capitalize on previous half-successes. Repeated attempts to break through the German lines were made as the British took Bazentin, Longeuval and eventually Delville Wood. When that sector started to get bogged down in late August, the focus moved north of the road to the high ground around Thiepval and the heavily fortified Schwaben Redoubt. The fighting was brutal in places and the Germans did not give any ground often staying in their positions for weeks unable to be relieved. But throughout their time the British army was learning how to fight a modern war.

I mean even on the first day, 18th division, their divisional commander actually gets them to go into no man's land at night lie down in no man's stand lightly equipped and as soon as the barrage lifts at zero-hour rush across no man's land and take those German trenches. That works, they get in there and capture those trenches. They also move troops up at night and start to launch attacks at night that happens in the middle of July into August/September.

These experimentations were not army-wide. It was often divisional or core level commanders trying new things and learning on the job. Likewise, artillery tactics were also developing.

Even if you've got a lot of artillery, if you spread it over a lot of targets it's not going to crush any of your targets. So the idea is you attack a smaller portion of the line so you can group your artillery together, hit fewer targets, but it means more shells per yard of battlefield so you're hitting those positions harder and harder.

One of the most famous instances of this experimentation came on the 15th of September when tanks were used for the first time at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette.

If you want to find out more about those tanks, I've linked our video on that in the description.

Because it's a new weapon a lot of the Germans absolutely freak out on the battlefield and abandon some of their positions. The big problem is only 36 tanks get to the start lines because mechanically they're very unreliable and by the end of that day there's really none left to use in subsequent days. All of these things are tried and the British army is on a learning curve through the Somme. There are going to be more big battles, more heavy casualties, but these are the seeds of battlefield success in 1918.

As the weather deteriorated into sleet and snow the final part of the battle in October and November was an attempt to bite off a few more German positions. The village of Beaumont Hamel, an objective on the first day of the battle, was finally taken in mid-November bringing the fight to a close. The British army had advanced a maximum of seven miles, but they'd learned a lot in that time and they had taken an important chunk out of the German army.

If you look at the German casualties alongside Verdun the Germans lose about 1,500,000 men in 1916. And in fact, if we look at what the Germans do in 1917, firstly they retreat to the Hindenburg Line because they just don't have the manpower left now really to hold the front line securely, the other thing they do of course is they go for unrestricted submarine warfare. The reason they risk doing that and potentially risk bringing America into the war is they cannot take another Somme battle and both Hindenburg and Ludendorff say we are doing this to prevent more Somme fighting, so the Somme is the key thing in the German army.

For the Allies though the heavy casualties did take their toll back home. Many towns and villages were forever changed as so-called 'Pals battalions', made up of people from the same area or profession, concentrated the losses in particular areas.

So, some of these towns are absolutely decimated by the Somme, almost everybody knows somebody if they haven't had a casualty themselves, they know somebody who has and it's normally somebody they personally know. They don't recruit Pals battalions after this it's just not worth it really.

Despite those casualties though, on the first day and beyond, the British soldiers and the British people remained entirely behind the war effort. This was in part thanks to propaganda films like the Battle of the Somme, a feature-length documentary shot within the trenches.

The Battle of Somme film was released really within weeks of the battle starting and it's seen by millions of people in Britain and people flock to this because it's their first chance to see something of what it is like to be a soldier on the Western Front. And of course that film the Battle of the Somme is one of the gems of the IWM collection.

Since then though the British public has started to have a different view of the events on the Somme. For many people it's an example of the so-called 'lions led by donkeys', generals who didn't care about the deaths of their own men. Although the horrendous losses on the first day of the Somme have never been surpassed, since the 1970s academics have started to form a different view of the battle.

Okay, we don't have a successful decisive breakthrough as Haig was hoping but unfortunately, if you want to defeat the main enemy in the main theatre of war you have to wear down his ability to fight. That means both sides are going to take heavy casualties. We've just got this fixation with that first day and those 57,000 casualties and we really need to look at the other 141 days of this battle which will lead, ultimately, to Allied victory in 1918.

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What Happened on the First Day of the Battle of the Somme?

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The first day of the Battle of the Somme has a prominent place in British history and popular memory and has come to represent the loss and apparent futility of the First World War. But what actually happened on 1 July 1916?

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The invention of plastic in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, who made the first fully synthetic plastic called bakelite, affected the whole world.

It started in the U.S. but quickly spread to other countries. this event was important because it changed how things were made. plastic replaces wood, metal, and glass in lots of products. It helped make cars, phones, and electronics that are cheaper and easier to produce. Today plastic is everywhere, but it also causes pollution, so now people are trying to find a way to recycle it.

https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/chemistry/age-plastic-parkesine-pollution#:~:text=Belgian%20chemist%20and%20clever%20marketeer,phenol%2C%20under%20heat%20and%20pressure.

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The chemical properties that have made plastic an incredibly useful and durable material also make it difficult to dispose of, with some types taking thousands-even tens of thousands-of years to degrade in landfill.

Plastic litter on a beach in Norway.

The degradation itself is an even bigger environmental issue, as the breaking down of plastics into microscopic particles pollutes our ocean, air and ecosystems. The health implications of microplastic deposits in our bodies are not yet fully known.

Many of our plastic problems began in the post-war period, when plastic began to replace the more expensive paper, glass and metal materials used in throwaway items, such as consumer packaging.

Among the worst offenders, along with polyethylene shopping bags and polystyrene food containers, is the PET (polyethylene terephthalate, a form of polyester) drinks bottle.

First patented in 1973 by American entrepreneur Nathaniel Wyeth, the PET bottle has many advantages over glass: lightweight for transport and safe in that it's virtually unbreakable.

The PET polymer was developed specifically to contain pressurised carbonated drinks, though its popularity as a container for still beverages, above all water, has boomed in the 21st century.

The economics of mass-produced, cheap plastic products have led to a single-use culture, and today around 500 billion PET bottles are sold every year.

This figure is increasing, and the majority of these bottles end up in our oceans, degrading into microplastics.

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The Age of Plastic: From Parkesine to pollution | Science Museum

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The 20th and 21st centuries have been dubbed the Plastics Age-when were the first plastics produced, and how have they changed our world?

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The creation of model T mostly affected the U.S. first but it then impacted Europe and other parts of the world

The creation of model T in 1908 by henry Ford changed the world by making cars affordable for everyday people, not just for the rich. Model T started a new era where people could travel far distances easily and quickly . it changed how cities were built and helped people get good jobs.

https://www.history.com/articles/model-t

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Model T - Ford, Car & Invented | HISTORY

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The Model T, sold by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1927, was the earliest effort to make a car that most people could actually buy. It became so popular at one point that a majority of Americans owned one, directly helping rural Americans become more connected with the rest of the country and leading to the numbered highway system.

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An atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki 1945

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An atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki 1945

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the atomic bomb dropped on nagasaki in 1945 ended WW2 by making japan surrender, but it also affected the whole world.

it showed how deadly nuclear weapons are and started a time when countries raced to build them, even today, the fear of nuclear war/weapons still shapes worlds politics

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/bombing-nagasaki-august-9-1945

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The Target Committee appointed by President Harry Truman to decide which Japanese cities would receive the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombings did not place Nagasaki among their top two choices. Instead they identified Kokura as the second target after Hiroshima. In Kokura, a city of 130,000 people on the island of Kyushu, the Japanese operated one of their biggest ordnance factories, manufacturing among other things chemical weapons. The Americans knew all this, but strangely had not targeted the city yet in their conventional bombing campaign. That was one of the reasons the Target Committee thought it would be a good option after Hiroshima.

The third choice, Nagasaki was a port city located about 100 miles from Kokura. It was larger, with an approximate population of 263,000 people, and some major military facilities, including two Mitsubishi military factories. Nagasaki also was an important port city. Like Kokura and Hiroshima, it had not suffered much thus far from American conventional bombing.

After the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, workers on Tinian island labored intensely to put the finishing touches on the Fat Man bomb and prepare it for use. This was a plutonium implosion device of far greater complexity than the Little Boy bomb used at Hiroshima, which used uranium-235 in a fairly conventional explosive mechanism. The scientists and ordnance experts at Los Alamos had agonized for years over how to use plutonium in an atomic weapon, and Fat Man was the result.

The decision to use Fat Man just days after the explosion of Little Boy at Hiroshima was based on two calculations: the always-changeable Japanese weather-the appearance of a typhoon or other major weather event could force deployment to be postponed for weeks-and the belief that two bombings following in quick succession would convince the Japanese that the Americans had plenty of atomic devices and were ready to keep using them until Japan finally surrendered. Reports of approaching bad weather convinced the Americans to drop the next bomb on August 9.

A B-29 named Bock's Car took off from Tinian at 3:47 that morning. In its belly was Fat Man, and the atomic bomb was already armed. Major Charles W. Sweeney flew the plane while its namesake, Captain Fredrick C. Bock, piloted Sweeney's usual mount christened "The Great Artiste." The two men had switched aircraft as "The Great Artiste" held the sensitive measuring equipment used to monitor the atomic event. The Enola Gay took part in the mission, flying weather reconnaissance.

Over Kokura, clouds and smoke from nearby bombing raids obscured visibility. The Americans could see parts of the city, but they could not site directly on the city arsenal that was their target. Sweeney flew overhead until Japanese antiaircraft fire and fighters made things "a little hairy," and it was obvious that sighting would be impossible. He then headed for his secondary target: Nagasaki. In Kokura, meanwhile, civilians who had taken shelter after the air raid signal heard the all-clear, emerged, and breathed sighs of relief. None of them knew then, of course, how close they had come to dying.

Clouds also obscured visibility over Nagasaki, and Maj. Sweeney, running out of fuel, prepared to turn back toward Okinawa. At the last second a hole opened in the clouds, however, and Bombardier Capt. Kermit K. Beahan announced that he could see his target. And so Fat Man began its journey, detonating over Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m. local time.

Fat Man detonated at an altitude of 1,650 feet over Nagasaki with a yield of 21 kilotons, about 40 percent more powerful than Little Boy had been. It did so almost directly above the Mitsubishi factories that were the city's primary targets, rather than over the residential and business districts further south. Tens of thousands of civilians, especially children, had already been evacuated from the city. The series of hills bracing Nagasaki also somewhat confined the initial blast and restricted the damage.

Still, the impact was devastating, particularly because people had heard the all-clear after an earlier aircraft raid warning, and had left their shelters. Everything within a mile of ground zero was annihilated. Fourteen thousand homes burst into flames. People close to the blast were vaporized; those unlucky enough to be just outside that radius received horrific burns and, there and further out, radiation poisoning that would eventually kill them. Although estimates vary, perhaps 40,000 people were killed by the initial detonation. By the beginning of 1946, 30,000 more people were dead. And within the next five years, well over 100,000 deaths were directly attributable to the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

This article is part of an ongoing series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by Bank of America.

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The Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945 | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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The Target Committee appointed by President Harry Truman to decide which Japanese cities would receive the Little Boy and Fat Man atomic bombings did not place Nagasaki among their top two choices. Instead they identified Kokura as the second target after Hiroshima.

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The invention of radar affects many parts of the world, especially during WW2 in europe and the pacific. It helped countries like britain spot enemies.

This changed how wars were fought because it gave armies an advantage in spotting the enemy first. radar technology also led to improvements in weather forecasting and air travel.

https://www.britannica.com/technology/radar/History-of-radar

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Early experiments

Serious developmental work on radar began in the 1930s, but the basic idea of radar had its origins in the classical experiments on electromagnetic radiation conducted by German physicist Heinrich Hertz during the late 1880s. Hertz set out to verify experimentally the earlier theoretical work of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell had formulated the general equations of the electromagnetic field, determining that both light and radio waves are examples of electromagnetic waves governed by the same fundamental laws but having widely different frequencies. Maxwell's work led to the conclusion that radio waves can be reflected from metallic objects and refracted by a dielectric medium, just as light waves can. Hertz demonstrated these properties in 1888, using radio waves at a wavelength of 66 cm (which corresponds to a frequency of about 455 MHz).

The potential utility of Hertz's work as the basis for the detection of targets of practical interest did not go unnoticed at the time. In 1904 a patent for "an obstacle detector and ship navigation device," based on the principles demonstrated by Hertz, was issued in several countries to Christian Hülsmeyer, a German engineer. Hülsmeyer built his invention and demonstrated it to the German navy but failed to arouse any interest. There was simply no economic, societal, or military need for radar until the early 1930s, when long-range military bombers capable of carrying large payloads were developed. This prompted the major countries of the world to look for a means with which to detect the approach of hostile aircraft.

Most of the countries that developed radar prior to World War II first experimented with other methods of aircraft detection. These included listening for the acoustic noise of aircraft engines and detecting the electrical noise from their ignition. Researchers also experimented with infrared sensors. None of these, however, proved effective.

First military radars

During the 1930s, efforts to use radio echoes for aircraft detection were initiated independently and almost simultaneously in eight countries that were concerned with the prevailing military situation and that already had practical experience with radio technology. The United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan all began experimenting with radar within about two years of one another and embarked, with varying degrees of motivation and success, on its development for military purposes. Several of these countries had some form of operational radar equipment in military service at the start of World War II.

The first observation of the radar effect at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., was made in 1922. NRL researchers positioned a radio transmitter on one shore of the Potomac River and a receiver on the other. A ship sailing on the river unexpectedly caused fluctuations in the intensity of the received signals when it passed between the transmitter and receiver. (Today such a configuration would be called bistatic radar.) In spite of the promising results of this experiment, U.S. Navy officials were unwilling to sponsor further work.

The principle of radar was "rediscovered" at NRL in 1930 when L.A. Hyland observed that an aircraft flying through the beam of a transmitting antenna caused a fluctuation in the received signal. Although Hyland and his associates at NRL were enthusiastic about the prospect of detecting targets by radio means and were eager to pursue its development in earnest, little interest was shown by higher authorities in the navy. Not until it was learned how to use a single antenna for both transmitting and receiving (now termed monostatic radar) was the value of radar for detecting and tracking aircraft and ships fully recognized. Such a system was demonstrated at sea on the battleship USS New York in early 1939.

The first radars developed by the U.S. Army were the SCR-268 (at a frequency of 205 MHz) for controlling antiaircraft gunfire and the SCR-270 (at a frequency of 100 MHz) for detecting aircraft. Both of these radars were available at the start of World War II, as was the navy's CXAM shipboard surveillance radar (at a frequency of 200 MHz). It was an SCR-270, one of six available in Hawaii at the time, that detected the approach of Japanese warplanes toward Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu, on December 7, 1941; however, the significance of the radar observations was not appreciated until bombs began to fall.

Britain commenced radar research for aircraft detection in 1935. The British government encouraged engineers to proceed rapidly because it was quite concerned about the growing possibility of war. By September 1938 the first British radar system, the Chain Home, had gone into 24-hour operation, and it remained operational throughout the war. The Chain Home radars allowed Britain to deploy successfully its limited air defenses against the heavy German air attacks conducted during the early part of the war. They operated at about 30 MHz-in what is called the shortwave, or HF, band-which is actually quite a low frequency for radar. It might not have been the optimum solution, but the inventor of British radar, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, believed that something that worked and was available was better than an ideal solution that was only a promise or might arrive too late.

The Soviet Union also started working on radar during the 1930s. At the time of the German attack on their country in June 1941, the Soviets had developed several different types of radars and had in production an aircraft-detection radar that operated at 75 MHz (in the very-high-frequency [VHF] band). Their development and manufacture of radar equipment was disrupted by the German invasion, and the work had to be relocated.

At the beginning of World War II, Germany had progressed farther in the development of radar than any other country. The Germans employed radar on the ground and in the air for defense against Allied bombers. Radar was installed on a German pocket battleship as early as 1936. Radar development was halted by the Germans in late 1940 because they believed the war was almost over. The United States and Britain, however, accelerated their efforts. By the time the Germans realized their mistake, it was too late to catch up.

Except for some German radars that operated at 375 and 560 MHz, all of the successful radar systems developed prior to the start of World War II were in the VHF band, below about 200 MHz. The use of VHF posed several problems. First, VHF beamwidths are broad. (Narrow beamwidths yield greater accuracy, better resolution, and the exclusion of unwanted echoes from the ground or other clutter.) Second, the VHF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum does not permit the wide bandwidths required for the short pulses that allow for greater accuracy in range determination. Third, VHF is subject to atmospheric noise, which limits receiver sensitivity. In spite of these drawbacks, VHF represented the frontier of radio technology in the 1930s, and radar development at this frequency range constituted a genuine pioneering accomplishment. It was well understood by the early developers of radar that operation at even higher frequencies was desirable, particularly since narrow beamwidths could be achieved without excessively large antennas.

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Serious developmental work on radar began in the 1930s, but the basic idea of radar had its origins in the classical experiments on electromagnetic radiation conducted by German physicist Heinrich Hertz during the late 1880s. Hertz set out to verify experimentally the earlier theoretical work of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

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the chinese revolution mainly affected China, it later than inspired communist movements in countries like Vietnam and korea.

The chinese civil war was fought between the kuomintang -led government of the republic of china and the forces of the CCP, with armed conflict continuing intermittently from 1 August 1927 until Communist victory resulted in their total control over mainland on 7 December.

the chinese revolution changed china from a monarchy to communist state, leading to a significant social, economic, and political reforms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War

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Chinese Civil War

Part of the interwar period, the Cold War (from 1947) and the Cross-Strait conflict (from 1949)

Clockwise from top: communist troops at the Battle of Siping; Muslim soldiers of the NRA; Mao Zedong in the 1930s; Chiang Kai-shek inspecting soldiers; CCP general Su Yu inspecting the troops shortly before the Menglianggu campaign

Date

Location

Result

Communist victory on the mainland and then diplomatic field in 1971, Taiwan Strait stalemate.

Territorial
changes

Chinese Communist Party control of Mainland China, including Hainan

People's Republic of China established in Mainland China

Government of the Republic of China evacuated to the island of Taiwan

Belligerents

1927-1937:
Republic of China

Fujian People's Government (1933-1934)

Supported by:

1946-1949:
Republic of China
Supported by:
Supported by:

Supported by:

Supported by:

Commanders and leaders

( Director-General of the Kuomintang)

( Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party)

Strength

2 million (regular)
2.3 million (militia) (June 1946)[2][3][4]

1.2 million (regular)
2.6 million (militia) (July 1945)[3][5]

Casualties and losses

c. 1.5 million (1948-1949)[6][4]

260,000 killed
190,000 missing
850,000 wounded (1945-1949)[7][6]

Above one estimate 1945-1949 set for combatants, with overall up to 6 million (including civilians)[6]

Early phase, 1928-1937: c. 7 million (including civilians)[8]

Concluding phase, 1945-1949: c. 2.5 million (including civilians)[9]

The Chinese Civil War was fought between the Kuomintang-led government of the Republic of China and forces of the Chinese Communist Party, armed conflict continuing intermittently from 1 August 1927 until 7 December 1949, and ending with Communist control of mainland China.

The war is generally divided into two phases with an interlude: from August 1927 to 1937, the KMT-CCP Alliance collapsed during the Northern Expedition, and the Nationalists controlled most of China. From 1937 to 1945, hostilities were mostly put on hold as the Second United Front fought the Japanese invasion of China with eventual help from the Allies of World War II, but even then co-operation between the KMT and CCP was minimal and armed clashes between them were common. Exacerbating the divisions within China further was that a puppet government, sponsored by Japan and nominally led by Wang Jingwei, was set up to nominally govern the parts of China under Japanese occupation.

The civil war resumed as soon as it became apparent that the Japanese defeat was imminent, and the communists gained the upper hand in the second phase of the war from 1945 to 1949.

The Communists gained control of mainland China and established the People's Republic of China in 1949, forcing the leadership of the Republic of China to retreat to the island of Taiwan. Starting in the 1950s, a lasting political and military standoff between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has ensued, with the ROC in Taiwan and the PRC in mainland China both officially claiming to be the legitimate government of all China. After the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, both tacitly ceased fire in 1979; however, no armistice or peace treaty has ever been signed.

Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the 1911 Revolution, Sun Yat-sen assumed the presidency of the newly formed Republic of China, and was shortly thereafter succeeded by Yuan Shikai.[page needed ] Yuan was frustrated in a short-lived attempt to restore monarchy in China, and China fell into power struggle after his death in 1916.

The Kuomintang (KMT), led by Sun Yat-sen, created a new government in Guangzhou to rival the warlords who ruled over large swathes of China and prevented the formation of a solid central government. After Sun's efforts to obtain aid from Western countries were ignored, he turned to the Soviet Union. In 1923, Sun and Soviet representative Adolph Joffe in Shanghai pledged Soviet assistance to China's unification in the Sun-Joffe Manifesto, a declaration of cooperation among the Comintern, KMT, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin arrived in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of both the CCP and the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CCP, which was initially a study group, and the KMT jointly formed the First United Front.

In 1923, Sun sent Chiang Kai-shek, one of his lieutenants, for several months of military and political study in Moscow. Chiang then became the head of the Whampoa Military Academy that trained the next generation of military leaders. The Soviets provided the academy with teaching material, organization, and equipment, including munitions. They also provided education in many of the techniques for mass mobilization. With this aid, Sun raised a dedicated "army of the party", with which he hoped to defeat the warlords militarily. CCP members were also present in the academy, and many of them became instructors, including Zhou Enlai, who was made a political instructor.

Communist members were allowed to join the KMT on an individual basis. The CCP itself was still small at the time, having a membership of 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925. As of 1923, the KMT had 50,000 members.

However, after Sun died in 1925, the KMT split into left- and right-wing movements. KMT members worried that the Soviets were trying to destroy the KMT from inside using the CCP. The CCP then began movements in opposition of the Northern Expedition, passing a resolution against it at a party meeting.

Then, in March 1927, the KMT held its second party meeting where the Soviets helped pass resolutions against the Expedition and curbing Chiang's power. Soon, the KMT would be clearly divided.

Throughout this time, the Soviet Union sent money and spies to support the CCP. Without their support, the communist party likely would have failed. This is evidenced by documents showing other communist parties in China at the time, one with as many as 10,000 members, which all failed without support from the Soviet Union.

In early 1927, the KMT-CCP rivalry led to a split in the revolutionary ranks. The CCP and the left wing of the KMT decided to move the seat of the KMT government from Guangzhou to Wuhan, where communist influence was strong. However, Chiang and Li Zongren, whose armies defeated the warlord Sun Chuanfang, moved eastward toward Jiangxi. The leftists rejected Chiang's demand to eliminate Communist influence within KMT, and Chiang denounced them for betraying Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People by taking orders from the Soviet Union. According to Mao Zedong, Chiang's tolerance of the CCP in the KMT camp decreased as his power increased.

On 7 April, Chiang and several other KMT leaders held a meeting, during which they proposed that Communist activities were socially and economically disruptive and had to be undone for the Nationalist revolution to proceed. On 12 April, in Shanghai, many Communist members in the KMT were purged through hundreds of arrests and executions on the orders of General Bai Chongxi. The CCP referred to this as the 12 April Incident, the White Terror, or the Shanghai Massacre. This incident widened the rift between Chiang and Wang Jingwei, the leader of the left wing faction of the KMT who controlled the city of Wuhan.

Eventually, the left wing of the KMT also expelled CCP members from the Wuhan government, which in turn was toppled by Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT resumed its campaign against warlords and captured Beijing in June 1928. Soon, most of eastern China was under the control of the Nanjing central government, which received prompt international recognition as the sole legitimate government of China. The KMT government announced, in conformity with Sun Yat-sen, the formula for the three stages of revolution: military unification, political tutelage, and constitutional democracy.

On 1 August 1927, the Communist Party launched an uprising in Nanchang against the Nationalist government in Wuhan. This conflict led to the creation of the Red Army. On 4 August, the main forces of the Red Army left Nanchang and headed southwards for an assault on Guangdong. Nationalist forces quickly reoccupied Nanchang while the remaining members of the CCP in Nanchang went into hiding. A CCP meeting on 7 August confirmed the objective of the party was to seize the political power by force, but the CCP was quickly suppressed the next day by the Nationalist government in Wuhan, led by Wang Jingwei. On 14 August, Chiang Kai-shek announced his temporary retirement, as the Wuhan faction and Nanjing faction of the Kuomintang were allied once again with common goal of suppressing the CCP after the earlier split. Wang Jingwei took the leadership of KMT after Chiang.[citation needed ]

Attempts were later made by the CCP to take the cities of Changsha, Shantou and Guangzhou. The Red Army consisting of mutinous former National Revolutionary Army (NRA) soldiers as well as armed peasants established control over several areas in southern China. KMT forces continued to attempt to suppress the rebellions. Then, in September, Wang Jingwei was forced out of Wuhan. September also saw an unsuccessful armed rural insurrection, known as the Autumn Harvest Uprising, led by Mao Zedong. Borodin then returned to the Soviet Union in October via Mongolia. In November, Chiang Kai-shek went to Shanghai and invited Wang to join him. On 11 December, the CCP started the Guangzhou Uprising, establishing a soviet there the next day, but lost the city by 13 December to a counter-attack under the orders of General Zhang Fakui. On 16 December, Wang Jingwei fled to France. There were now three capitals in China: the internationally recognized republic capital in Beijing, the CCP and left-wing KMT at Wuhan and the right-wing KMT regime at Nanjing, which would remain the KMT capital for the next decade.

This marked the beginning of a ten-year armed struggle, known in mainland China as the "Ten-Year Civil War" (十年内战) which ended with the Xi'an Incident, when Chiang Kai-shek was forced to form the Second United Front against invading forces from the Empire of Japan. In 1930, the Central Plains War broke out as an internal conflict of the KMT; launched by Feng Yuxiang, Yan Xishan, and Wang Jingwei. The attention was turned to root out remaining pockets of CCP activity in a series of five encirclement campaigns. The first and second campaigns failed, and the third was aborted due to the Mukden Incident. The fourth campaign (1932-1933) achieved some early successes, but Chiang's armies were badly mauled when they tried to penetrate into the heart of Mao's Soviet Chinese Republic. During these campaigns, KMT columns struck swiftly into CCP areas, but were easily engulfed by the vast countryside and were not able to consolidate their foothold.

Finally, in late 1934, Chiang launched a fifth campaign that involved the systematic encirclement of the Jiangxi Soviet region with fortified blockhouses. The blockhouse strategy was devised and implemented in part by newly hired Nazi advisors. Unlike previous campaigns in which they penetrated deeply in a single strike, this time the KMT troops patiently built blockhouses, each separated by about eight kilometres (five miles), to surround the Communist areas and cut off their supplies and food sources.

This military retreat was undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, to evade the pursuit or attack of the Kuomintang army. It consisted of a series of marches, during which numerous Communist armies in the south escaped to the north and west. Over the course of the march from Jiangxi the First Front Army, led by an inexperienced military commission, was on the brink of annihilation by Chiang Kai-Shek's troops as their stronghold was in Jiangxi. The Communists, under the command of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, "escaped in a circling retreat to the west and north, which reportedly traversed over 9,000 kilometers over 370 days." The route passed through some of the most difficult terrain of western China by traveling west, and then northwards towards Shaanxi. "In November 1935, shortly after settling in northern Shaanxi, Mao officially took over Zhou Enlai's leading position in the Red Army. Following a major reshuffling of official roles, Mao became the chairman of the Military Commission, with Zhou and Deng Xiaoping as vice-chairmen." This marked Mao's position as the pre-eminent leader of the Party, with Zhou in second position to him.[citation needed ]

The march ended when the CCP reached the interior of Shaanxi. Zhang Guotao's army (Red 4th Front Army), which took a different route through northwest China, was largely destroyed by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese Muslim allies, the Ma clique. Along the way, the Communist army confiscated property and weapons from local warlords and landlords, while recruiting peasants and the poor, solidifying its appeal to the masses. Of the 90,000-100,000 people who began the Long March from the Soviet Chinese Republic, only around 7,000-8,000 made it to Shaanxi. The remnants of Zhang's forces eventually joined Mao in Shaanxi, but with his army destroyed, Zhang, even as a founding member of the CCP, was never able to challenge Mao's authority. Essentially, the great retreat made Mao the undisputed leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Kuomintang used Khampa troops-who were former bandits-to battle the Communist Red Army as it advanced and to undermine local warlords who often refused to fight Communist forces to conserve their own strength. The KMT enlisted 300 "Khampa bandits" into its Consolatory Commission military in Sichuan, where they were part of the effort of the central government to penetrate and destabilize local Han warlords such as Liu Wenhui. The government was seeking to exert full control over frontier areas against the warlords. Liu had refused to battle the Communists in order to conserve his army. The Consolatory Commission forces were used to battle the Red Army, but they were defeated when their religious leader was captured by the Communists.

In 1936, Zhou Enlai and Zhang Xueliang grew closer, with Zhou even suggesting that he join the CCP. However, this was turned down by the Comintern in the USSR. Later on, Zhou persuaded Zhang and Yang Hucheng, another warlord, to instigate the Xi'an Incident. Chiang was placed under house arrest and forced to stop his attacks on the Red Army, instead focusing on the Japanese threat.

During Japan's invasion and occupation of Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek saw the CCP as the greater threat. Chiang refused to ally with the CCP, preferring to unite China by eliminating the warlord and CCP forces first. He believed his forces were too weak to face the Japanese Imperial Army; only after unification could the KMT mobilize against Japan. He ignored the Chinese people's discontent and anger at the KMT policy of compromise with the Japanese, instead ordering KMT generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng to suppress the CCP. However, their provincial forces suffered significant casualties in battles with the Red Army.

On 12 December 1936, the disgruntled Zhang and Yang conspired to kidnap Chiang and force him into a truce with the CCP. The incident became known as the Xi'an Incident. Both parties suspended fighting to form a Second United Front to focus their energies and fight the Japanese. In 1937, Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China and its well-equipped troops overran KMT defenders in northern and coastal China.

The alliance of CCP and KMT was in name only. Unlike the KMT forces, CCP troops shunned conventional warfare and instead waged guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. The level of actual cooperation and coordination between the CCP and KMT during World War II was minimal. In the midst of the Second United Front, the CCP and the KMT were still vying for territorial advantage in " Free China" (i.e., areas not occupied by the Japanese or ruled by Japanese puppet governments such as Manchukuo and the Reorganized National Government of China).

The situation came to a head in late 1940 and early 1941 when clashes between Communist and KMT forces intensified. Chiang demanded in December 1940 that the CCP's New Fourth Army evacuate Anhui and Jiangsu Provinces, due to its provocation and harassment of KMT forces in this area. Under intense pressure, the New Fourth Army commanders complied. The following year they were ambushed by KMT forces during their evacuation, which led to several thousand deaths. It also ended the Second United Front, formed earlier to fight the Japanese.

As clashes between the CCP and KMT intensified, countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to prevent a disastrous civil war. After the New Fourth Army incident, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent special envoy Lauchlin Currie to talk with Chiang Kai-shek and KMT party leaders to express their concern regarding the hostility between the two parties, with Currie stating that the only ones to benefit from a civil war would be the Japanese. The Soviet Union, allied more closely with the CCP, sent an imperative telegram to Mao in 1941, warning that civil war would also make the situation easier for the Japanese military. Due to the international community's efforts, there was a temporary and superficial peace. Chiang criticized the CCP in 1943 with the propaganda piece China's Destiny, which questioned the CCP's power after the war, while the CCP strongly opposed Chiang's leadership and referred to his regime as fascist in an attempt to generate a negative public image. Both leaders knew that a deadly battle had begun between themselves.

In general, developments in the Second Sino-Japanese War were to the advantage of the CCP, as its guerrilla war tactics had won them popular support within the Japanese-occupied areas. However, the KMT had to defend the country against the main Japanese campaigns, since it was the legal Chinese government, a factor which proved costly to Chiang Kai-shek and his troops. Japan launched its last major offensive against the KMT, Operation Ichi-Go, in 1944, which resulted in the severe weakening of Chiang's forces. The CCP also suffered fewer losses through its guerrilla tactics. By the end of the war, the Red Army had grown to more than 1.3 million members, with a separate militia of over 2.6 million. About one hundred million people lived in CCP-controlled zones.

Under the terms of the Japanese unconditional surrender dictated by the Allies, Japanese troops were to surrender to KMT troops but not to the CCP, which was present in some of the occupied areas. In Manchuria, however, where the KMT had no forces, the Japanese surrendered to the Soviet Union. Chiang Kai-shek reminded Japanese troops to remain at their posts to receive the KMT, but Communist forces soon began taking surrenders from the Japanese and fighting those who resisted. General Wedemeyer of the United States Army became alarmed at these developments and wanted seven American divisions to be sent to China, but General Marshall replied that it should not be given priority over Japan and Korea.

The first post-war peace negotiation, attended by both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, was in Chongqing from 28 August to 10 October 1945. Chiang entered the meeting at an advantage because he had recently signed a friendly treaty with the Soviet Union while the Communists were still forcing the Japanese to surrender in some places. Mao was accompanied by American ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, who was devoted to Chiang but also wanted to ensure Mao's safety in light of the past history between the two Chinese leaders. It concluded with the signing of the Double Tenth Agreement. Both sides stressed the importance of a peaceful reconstruction, but the conference did not produce any concrete results. Battles between the two sides continued even as peace negotiations were in progress, until the agreement was reached in January 1946. However, large campaigns and full-scale confrontations between the CCP and Chiang's troops were temporarily avoided.

In the last month of World War II in East Asia, Soviet forces launched the huge Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation against the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria and along the Chinese-Mongolian border. This operation destroyed the Kwantung Army in just three weeks and left the USSR occupying all of Manchuria by the end of the war in a total power vacuum of local Chinese forces. Consequently, the 700,000 Japanese troops stationed in the region surrendered. Later in the year Chiang Kai-shek realized that he lacked the resources to prevent a CCP takeover of Manchuria following the scheduled Soviet departure. He therefore made a deal with the Soviets to delay their withdrawal until he had moved enough of his best-trained men and modern material into the region. However, the Soviets refused permission for the Nationalist troops to traverse its territory and spent the extra time systematically dismantling the extensive Manchurian industrial base (worth up to $2 billion) and shipping it back to their war-ravaged country. KMT troops were then airlifted by the US to occupy key cities in North China, while the countryside was already dominated by the CCP. On 15 November 1945, the KMT began a campaign to prevent the CCP from strengthening its already strong base. At the same time, however, the return of the KMT also brought widespread graft and corruption, with an OSS officer remarking that the only winners were the Communists.

Chiang Kai-shek's forces pushed as far as Chinchow (Jinzhou) by 26 November 1945, meeting with little resistance. This was followed by a Communist offensive on the Shandong Peninsula that was largely successful, as all of the peninsula, except what was controlled by the US, fell to the Communists. The truce fell apart in June 1946 when full-scale war between CCP and KMT forces broke out on 26 June 1946. China then entered a state of civil war that lasted more than three years.

By the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the power of the Communist Party grew considerably. Their main force grew to 1.2 million troops, backed with additional militia of 2 million, totalling 3.2 million troops. Their "Liberated Zone" in 1945 contained 19 base areas, including one-quarter of the country's territory and one-third of its population; this included many important towns and cities. Moreover, the Soviet Union turned over all of its captured Japanese weapons and a substantial amount of their own supplies to the Communists, who received Northeastern China from the Soviets as well.

In March 1946, despite repeated requests from Chiang, the Soviet Red Army under the command of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky continued to delay pulling out of Manchuria, while Malinovsky secretly told the CCP forces to move in behind them, which led to full-scale war for the control of the Northeast. These favorable conditions also facilitated many changes inside the Communist leadership: the more radical hard-line faction who wanted a complete military take-over of China finally gained the upper hand and defeated the careful opportunists. Before giving control to Communist leaders, on 27 March, Soviet diplomats requested a joint venture of industrial development with the Nationalist Party in Manchuria.

Although General Marshall stated that he knew of no evidence that the CCP was being supplied by the Soviet Union, the CCP was able to utilize a large number of weapons abandoned by the Japanese, including some tanks. When large numbers of well-trained KMT troops began to defect to the Communist forces, the CCP was finally able to achieve material superiority. The CCP's ultimate trump card was its land reform policy. This drew the massive number of landless and starving peasants in the countryside into the Communist cause. This strategy enabled the CCP to access an almost unlimited supply of manpower for both combat and logistical purposes; despite suffering heavy casualties throughout many of the war's campaigns, manpower continued to grow. For example, during the Huaihai Campaign alone the CCP was able to mobilize 5,430,000 peasants to fight against the KMT forces.

After the war with the Japanese ended, Chiang Kai-shek quickly moved KMT troops to newly liberated areas to prevent Communist forces from receiving the Japanese surrender. The US airlifted many KMT troops from central China to the Northeast (Manchuria). President Harry S. Truman was very clear about what he described as "using the Japanese to hold off the Communists". In his memoirs he writes:

It was perfectly clear to us that if we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the Communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison until we could airlift Chinese National troops to South China and send Marines to guard the seaports.

Using the pretext of "receiving the Japanese surrender", business interests within the KMT government occupied most of the banks, factories and commercial properties, which had previously been seized by the Imperial Japanese Army. They also conscripted troops at an accelerated pace from the civilian population and hoarded supplies, preparing for a resumption of war with the Communists. These hasty and harsh preparations caused great hardship for the residents of cities such as Shanghai, where the unemployment rate rose dramatically to 37.5%.

The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. About 50,000 US soldiers were sent to guard strategic sites in Hebei and Shandong in Operation Beleaguer. The US equipped and trained KMT troops, and transported Japanese and Koreans back to help KMT forces to occupy liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas. According to William Blum, American aid included substantial amounts of mostly surplus military supplies, and loans were made to the KMT. Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US-most of which was military aid.

As postwar negotiations between the Nationalist government in Nanjing and the Communist Party failed, the civil war between these two parties resumed. This stage of war is referred to in mainland China and Communist historiography as the "War of Liberation" (Chinese: 解放战争; pinyin: Jiěfàng Zhànzhēng ). On 20 July 1946, Chiang Kai-shek launched a large-scale assault on Communist territory in North China with 113 brigades (a total of 1.6 million troops). This marked the first stage of the final phase in the Chinese Civil War.

Knowing their disadvantages in manpower and equipment, the CCP executed a "passive defense" strategy. It avoided the strong points of the KMT army and was prepared to abandon territory in order to preserve its forces. In most cases the surrounding countryside and small towns had come under Communist influence long before the cities. The CCP also attempted to wear out the KMT forces as much as possible. This tactic seemed to be successful; after a year, the power balance became more favorable to the CCP. They wiped out 1.12 million KMT troops, while their strength grew to about two million men.

In March 1947, the KMT achieved a symbolic victory by seizing the CCP capital of Yan'an. The Communists counterattacked soon afterwards; on 30 June 1947, CCP troops crossed the Yellow River and moved to the Dabie Mountains area, restored and developed the Central Plain. At the same time, Communist forces also began to counterattack in Northeastern China, North China and East China.

By late 1948, the CCP eventually captured the northern cities of Shenyang and Changchun and seized control of the Northeast after suffering numerous setbacks while trying to take the cities, with the decisive Liaoshen Campaign. The New 1st Army, regarded as the best KMT army, was forced to surrender after the CCP conducted a brutal six-month siege of Changchun that resulted in more than 150,000 civilian deaths from starvation.

The capture of large KMT units provided the CCP with the tanks, heavy artillery and other combined-arms assets needed to execute offensive operations south of the Great Wall. By April 1948, the city of Luoyang fell, cutting the KMT army off from Xi'an. Following a fierce battle, the CCP captured Jinan and Shandong province on 24 September 1948. The Huaihai Campaign of late 1948 and early 1949 secured east-central China for the CCP. The outcome of these encounters were decisive for the military outcome of the civil war.

The Pingjin Campaign resulted in the Communist conquest of northern China. It lasted 64 days, from 21 November 1948 to 31 January 1949. The PLA suffered heavy casualties while securing Zhangjiakou, Tianjin along with its port and garrison at Dagu and Beiping. The CCP brought 890,000 troops from the northeast to oppose some 600,000 KMT troops. There were 40,000 CCP casualties at Zhangjiakou alone. They in turn killed, wounded or captured some 520,000 KMT during the campaign.

After achieving decisive victory at Liaoshen, Huaihai and Pingjin campaigns, the CCP destroyed 144 regular and 29 irregular KMT divisions, including 1.54 million veteran KMT troops, which significantly reduced the strength of Nationalist forces. Stalin initially favored a coalition government in postwar China, and tried to persuade Mao to stop the CCP from crossing the Yangtze and attacking the KMT positions south of the river. Mao rejected Stalin's position and on 21 April, and began the Yangtze River Crossing Campaign. On 23 April, they captured the KMT's capital, Nanjing. The KMT government retreated to Canton (Guangzhou) until 15 October, Chongqing until 25 November, and then Chengdu before retreating to Taiwan on 7 December. By late 1949, the People's Liberation Army was pursuing remnants of KMT forces southwards in southern China, and only Tibet was left. A Chinese Muslim Hui cavalry regiment, the 14th Tungan Cavalry, was sent by the Kuomintang to attack Mongol and Soviet positions along the border during the Pei-ta-shan Incident.

The Kuomintang made several last-ditch attempts to use Khampa troops against the Communists in southwest China. The Kuomintang formulated a plan in which three Khampa divisions would be assisted by the Panchen Lama to oppose the Communists. Kuomintang intelligence reported that some Tibetan tusi chiefs and the Khampa Su Yonghe controlled 80,000 troops in Sichuan, Qinghai and Tibet. They hoped to use them against the Communist army.

On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China with its capital at Beiping, which was returned to the former name Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and approximately two million Nationalist soldiers retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan in December after the PLA advanced into Sichuan province. Isolated Nationalist pockets of resistance remained in the area, but the majority of the resistance collapsed after the fall of Chengdu on 10 December 1949, with some resistance continuing in the far south.

A PRC attempt to take the ROC-controlled island of Quemoy was thwarted in the Battle of Kuningtou, halting the PLA advance towards Taiwan. In December 1949, Chiang proclaimed Taipei the temporary capital of the Republic of China and continued to assert his government as the sole legitimate authority in China.

Most observers expected Chiang's government to eventually fall to the imminent invasion of Taiwan by the People's Liberation Army, and the US was initially reluctant in offering full support for Chiang in their final stand. US President Harry S. Truman announced on 5 January 1950 that the United States would not engage in any dispute involving the Taiwan Strait, and that he would not intervene in the event of an attack by the PRC. Truman, seeking to exploit the possibility of a Titoist-style Sino-Soviet split, announced in his United States Policy toward Formosa that the US would obey the Cairo Declaration's designation of Taiwan as Chinese territory and would not assist the Nationalists. However, the Communist leadership was not aware of this change of policy, instead becoming increasingly hostile to the US. The situation quickly changed after the sudden onset of the Korean War in June 1950. This led to changing political climate in the US, and President Truman ordered the United States Seventh Fleet to sail to the Taiwan Strait as part of the containment policy against potential Communist advance.

In June 1949, the ROC declared a "closure" of all mainland China ports and its navy attempted to intercept all foreign ships. The closure was from a point north of the mouth of Min River in Fujian to the mouth of the Liao River in Liaoning. Since mainland China's railroad network was underdeveloped, north-south trade depended heavily on sea lanes. ROC naval activity also caused severe hardship for mainland China fishermen.

During the retreat of the Republic of China to Taiwan, KMT troops, who couldn't retreat to Taiwan, were left behind to fight a guerrilla war against the Communists. These KMT remnants were eliminated in what the PRC called the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and the Campaigns to Suppress Bandits. According to official statistics from the CCP in 1954, during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, at least 2.6 million people were arrested, some 1.29 million people were imprisoned, and 712,000 people were executed. Most of those killed were former Kuomintang officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies and intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect.

Winning China proper in 1950, also after Annexation of Tibet, the CCP controlled the entire mainland in late 1951 (excluding Kinmen and Matsu Islands). But a group of approximately 3,000 KMT Central soldiers retreated to Burma and continued launching guerrilla attacks into south China during the Kuomintang Islamic Insurgency in China (1950-1958) and Campaign at the China-Burma Border. Their leader, Li Mi, was paid a salary by the ROC government and given the nominal title of Governor of Yunnan. Initially, the US-supported these remnants and the Central Intelligence Agency provided them with military aid. After the Burmese government appealed to the United Nations in 1953, the US began pressuring the ROC to withdraw its loyalists. By the end of 1954 nearly 6,000 soldiers had left Burma and Li declared his army disbanded. However, thousands remained, and the ROC continued to supply and command them, even secretly supplying reinforcements at times to maintain a base close to China.

After the ROC complained to the United Nations against the Soviet Union for violating the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance to support the CCP, the UN General Assembly Resolution 505 was adopted on 1 February 1952, condemning the Soviet Union.

In the end, the Communist military forces suffered 1.3 million combat casualties in the 1945-1949 phase of the war: 260,000 killed, 190,000 missing, and 850,000 wounded, discounting irregulars. Nationalist casualties in the same phase were recorded after the war by the PRC 5,452,700 regulars and 2,258,800 irregulars.

Though viewed as a military liability by the US, the ROC viewed its remaining islands in Fujian as vital for any future campaign to defeat the PRC and retake mainland China. On 3 September 1954, the First Taiwan Strait Crisis began when the PLA started shelling Kinmen and threatened to take the Dachen Islands in Zhejiang. On 20 January 1955, the PLA took nearby Yijiangshan Island, with the entire ROC garrison of 720 troops killed or wounded defending the island. On 24 January of the same year, the United States Congress passed the Formosa Resolution authorizing the President to defend the ROC's offshore islands. The First Taiwan Straits crisis ended in March 1955 when the PLA ceased its bombardment. The crisis was brought to a close during the Bandung conference.

The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis began on 23 August 1958 with air and naval engagements between PRC and ROC forces, leading to intense artillery bombardment of Quemoy (by the PRC) and Amoy (by the ROC), and ended on November of the same year. PLA patrol boats blockaded the islands from ROC supply ships. Though the US rejected Chiang Kai-shek's proposal to bomb mainland China artillery batteries, it quickly moved to supply fighter jets and anti-aircraft missiles to the ROC. It also provided amphibious assault ships to land supplies, as a sunken ROC naval vessel was blocking the harbor. On 7 September, the US escorted a convoy of ROC supply ships and the PRC refrained from firing.

The third crisis occurred in 1995-96. The PLA responded to Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui's visit to the United States, and the U.S. recognition of Lee as a representative of Taiwan with military exercises. PLA actions were also meant to deter Taiwanese voters from supporting Lee in the 1996 election. The U.S. deployed two aircraft carriers in response to the PLA's actions and Lee won the election. The carriers were not attacked and deescalation followed.

U.S. speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022 triggered the PLA to cause military exercises across the Taiwan Strait. She originally intended to travel to Taiwan in April 2022, but was delayed due to COVID-19. She rescheduled the trip to August as part of a wider Asian trip. The White House was reported to have been initially divided over the appropriateness of the trip but later affirmed Pelosi's right to visit Taiwan. As a result, the PLA announced four days of unprecedented military live-fire drills, in six zones that encircle the island on the busiest international waterways and aviation routes. In response to the announcement, ROC officials complained that the PLA's live-fire drills were an invasion of Taiwan's territorial space and a direct challenge to free air and sea navigation.

By 1984, PRC and ROC began to de-escalate their hostilities through diplomatic relations with each other, and cross-straits trade and investment has been growing ever since. The state of war was officially declared over by the ROC in 1991. Despite the end of the hostilities, the two sides have never signed any agreement or treaty to officially end the war. According to Mao Zedong, there were three ways of "staving off imperialist intervention in the short term" during the continuation of the Chinese Revolution. The first was through a rapid completion of the military takeover of the country, and through showing determination and strength against "foreign attempts at challenging the new regime along its borders". The second was by "formalising a comprehensive military alliance with the Soviet Union", which would dedicate Soviet power to directly defending China against its enemies; this aspect became extensively significant given the backdrop of the start of the Cold War. And finally, the regime had to "root out its domestic opponents: the heads of secret societies, religious sects, independent unions, or tribal and ethnic organisations". By destroying the basis of domestic reaction, Mao believed a safer world for the Chinese revolution to spread in would come into existence.

With the election in 2000 of Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian, a party other than the KMT gained the presidency for the first time in Taiwan. The new president did not share the Chinese nationalist ideology of the KMT and CCP. This led to tension between the two sides, although trade and other ties such as the 2005 Pan-Blue visit continued to increase.

With the election of Pro-mainland President Ma Ying-jeou (KMT) in 2008, significant warming of relations resumed between Taipei and Beijing, with high-level exchanges between the semi-official diplomatic organizations of both states such as the Chen-Chiang summit series. Although the Taiwan Strait remains a potential flash point, regular direct air links were established in 2009.[page needed ]

The historian Rana Mitter concluded that the Nationalist government in 1945 had been "fundamentally destroyed by the war with Japan". Mitter writes that a lack of trust in the Nationalist government developed, as it was increasingly seen as "corrupt, vindictive, and with no overall vision of what China under its rule should look like".

Historian Odd Arne Westad says the Communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military mistakes than Chiang Kai-shek and also because in his search for a powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest groups in China. Furthermore, his party was weakened in the war against the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Communists targeted different groups, such as peasants, and brought them to their side.

Chiang wrote in his diary in June 1948: "After the fall of Kaifeng our conditions worsened and became more serious. I now realized that the main reason our nation has collapsed, time after time throughout our history, was not because of superior power used by our external enemies, but because of disintegration and rot from within."

The better-trained Communist army was also able to receive support from the USSR, which helped to counter the American aid that the Nationalists received. Chen Yun said: "They did their best to help us, we were backed by the Soviet Union and North Korea."

Strong American support for the Nationalists was hedged with the failure of the Marshall Mission, and then stopped completely mainly because of KMT corruption (such as the notorious Yangtze Development Corporation controlled by H.H. Kung and T. V. Soong's family) and KMT's military setback in Northeast China.

The main advantage of the Chinese Communist Party was the "extraordinary cohesion" within the top level of its leadership. These skills were not only secured from defections that came about during difficult times but also coupled with "communications and top level debates over tactics". The charismatic style of leadership of Mao Zedong created a "unity of purpose" and a "unity of command" which the KMT lacked. Apart from that, the CCP had mastered the manipulation of local politics to their benefit; this was also derived from their propaganda skills that had also been decentralised successfully by portraying their opponents as "enemies of all groups of Chinese" and itself as "defenders of the nation" and people (given the backdrop of the war with Japan).

In the Chinese Civil War after 1945, the economy in the ROC areas collapsed because of hyperinflation and the failure of price controls by the ROC government and financial reforms; the Gold Yuan devaluated sharply in late 1948 and resulted in the ROC government losing the support of the cities' middle classes. In the meantime, the Communists continued their relentless land reform ( land redistribution) programs to win the support of the population in the countryside.

Historians such as Jay Taylor, Robert Cowley, and Anne W. Carroll argue that the nationalists' failure was largely caused by external reasons outside of the KMT's control, most notably the refusal of the Truman administration to support Chiang with the withdrawal of aid, the US armed embargo, the failed pursuit of a détente between the nationalists and the communists, and the USSR's consistent support of the CPC in the Chinese Civil War.

During the war, both the Nationalists and Communists carried out mass atrocities, with millions of non-combatants deliberately killed by both sides. Benjamin Valentino has estimated atrocities in the Chinese Civil War resulted in the death of between 1.8 million and 3.5 million people between 1927 and 1949.[better source needed ][dubious ]

Over several years after the 1927 Shanghai massacre, the Kuomintang killed between 300,000 and one million people, primarily peasants, in anti-communist campaigns as part of the White Terror. During the White Terror, the Nationalists specifically targeted women with short hair who had not been subjected to foot binding, on the presumption that such "non-traditional" women were radicals. Nationalist forces cut off their breasts, shaved their heads, and displayed their mutilated bodies to intimidate the populace.

From 1946 to 1949, the Nationalists arrested, tortured, and killed political dissidents via the Sino-American Cooperative Organization.

During the December 1930 Futian incident, the communists executed 2,000 to 3,000 members of the Futian battalion after its leaders had mutinied against Mao Zedong.

Between 1931 and 1934 in the Jiangxi-Fujian Soviet, the communist authorities engaged in a widespread campaign of violence against civilians to ensure compliance with its policies and to stop defection to the advancing KMT, including mass executions, land confiscation and forced labor. According to Li Weihan, a high-ranking communist in Jiangxi at the time, in response to mass flight of civilians to KMT held areas, the local authorities authorities would "usually to send armed squads after those attempting to flee and kill them on the spot, producing numerous mass graves throughout the CSR [Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi] that would later be uncovered by the KMT and its allies." Zhang Wentian, another high-ranking communist, reported that "the policy of annihilating landlords as an exploiting class had degenerated into a massacre" The population of the communist controlled area fell by 700,000 from 1931 and 1935, of which a large proportion were murdered as "class enemies", worked to death, committed suicide, or died in other circumstances attributable to the communists.

During the Siege of Changchun, the People's Liberation Army implemented a military blockade on the KMT-held city of Changchun and prevented civilians from leaving the city during the blockade; this blockade caused the starvation of tens to 150 thousand civilians. The PLA continued to use siege tactics throughout Northeast China.

At the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War in 1946, Mao Zedong began to push for a return to radical policies to mobilize China against the landlord class, but protected the rights of middle peasants and specified that rich peasants were not landlords. The 7 July Directive of 1946 set off eighteen months of fierce conflict in which all rich peasant and landlord property of all types was to be confiscated and redistributed to poor peasants. Party work teams went quickly from village to village and divided the population into landlords, rich, middle, poor, and landless peasants. Because the work teams did not involve villagers in the process, however, rich and middle peasants quickly returned to power. The Outline Land Law of October 1947 increased the pressure. Those condemned as landlords were buried alive, dismembered, strangled and shot. In response to the aforementioned land reform campaign, the Kuomintang helped establish the "Huanxiang Tuan" (還鄉團), or Homecoming Legion, which was composed of landlords who sought the return of their redistributed land and property from peasants and CCP guerrillas, as well as forcibly conscripted peasants and communist POWs. The Homecoming legion conducted its guerrilla warfare campaign against CCP forces and purported collaborators up until the end of the civil war in 1949.

Cheng, Victor Shiu Chiang. "Imagining China's Madrid in Manchuria: The Communist Military Strategy at the Onset of the Chinese Civil War, 1945-1946." Modern China 31.1 (2005): 72-114.

Chi, Hsi-sheng. Nationalist China at War: Military Defeats and Political Collapse, 1937-45 (U of Michigan Press, 1982).

Dreyer, Edward L. China at War 1901-1949 (Routledge, 2014).

Dupuy, Trevor N. The Military History of the Chinese Civil War (Franklin Watts, Inc., 1969).

Eastman, Lloyd E. "Who lost China? Chiang Kai-shek testifies." China Quarterly 88 (1981): 658-668.

Eastman, Lloyd E., et al. The Nationalist Era in China, 1927-1949 (Cambridge UP, 1991).

Fenby, Jonathan. Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (2003).

Ferlanti, Federica. "The New Life Movement at War: Wartime Mobilisation and State Control in Chongqing and Chengdu, 1938-1942" European Journal of East Asian Studies 11#2 (2012), pp. 187-212 online how Nationalist forces mobilized society

Jian, Chen. "The Myth of America's "Lost Chance" in China: A Chinese Perspective in Light of New Evidence." Diplomatic History 21.1 (1997): 77-86.

Lary, Diana. China's Civil War: A Social History, 1945-1949 (Cambridge UP, 2015). excerpt

Levine, Steven I. "A new look at American mediation in the Chinese civil war: the Marshall mission and Manchuria." Diplomatic History 3.4 (1979): 349-376.

Lew, Christopher R. The Third Chinese Revolutionary Civil War, 1945-49: An Analysis of Communist Strategy and Leadership (Routledge, 2009).

Li, Xiaobing. China at War: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2012).

Lynch, Michael. The Chinese Civil War 1945-49 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014).

Mitter, Rana. "Research Note Changed by War: The Changing Historiography Of Wartime China and New Interpretations Of Modern Chinese History." Chinese Historical Review 17.1 (2010): 85-95.

Nasca, David S. Western Influence on the Chinese National Revolutionary Army from 1925 to 1937. (Marine Corps Command And Staff Coll Quantico Va, 2013). online

Pepper, Suzanne. Civil war in China: the political struggle 1945-1949 (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

Reilly, Major Thomas P. Mao Tse-Tung And Operational Art During The Chinese Civil War (Pickle Partners Publishing, 2015) online.

Shen, Zhihua, and Yafeng Xia. Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History. (Lexington Books, 2015).

Tanner, Harold M. (2015), Where Chiang Kai-shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, advanced military history. excerpt

Taylor, Jeremy E., and Grace C. Huang. "'Deep changes in interpretive currents'? Chiang Kai-shek studies in the post-cold war era." International Journal of Asian Studies 9.1 (2012): 99-121.

Taylor, Jay. The Generalissimo (Harvard University Press, 2009). biography of Chiang Kai-shek

van de Ven, Hans (2017). China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China, 1937-1952. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674983502..

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chinese Civil War Part of the interwar period, the Cold War (from 1947) and the Cross-Strait conflict (from 1949) Clockwise from top: communist troops at the Battle of Siping; Muslim soldiers of the NRA; Mao Zedong in the 1930s; Chiang Kai-shek inspecting soldiers; CCP general Su Yu inspecting the troops shortly before the Menglianggu campaign Date Location Result Communist victory on the mainland and then diplomatic field in 1971, Taiwan Strait stalemate.

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The Green Revolution mainly affected developing countries, especially in asia and latin america.

green revolution was the great increase in production of food grains, especially wheat and rice, that resulted in large part from the introduction into developing countries of new, high-yielding varieties, beginning in the mid-20th century

the green revolution changed agriculture by increasing food production through new crop varieties and farming techniques.

https://www.britannica.com/event/green-revolution

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

green revolution, great increase in production of food grains (especially wheat and rice) that resulted in large part from the introduction into developing countries of new, high-yielding varieties, beginning in the mid-20th century. Its early dramatic successes were in Mexico and the Indian subcontinent. The new varieties require large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to produce their high yields, raising concerns about cost and potentially harmful environmental effects. Poor farmers, unable to afford the fertilizers and pesticides, have often reaped even lower yields with these grains than with the older strains, which were better adapted to local conditions and had some resistance to pests and diseases. See also Norman Borlaug.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Green revolution | Definition, Advantages, Importance, & Facts

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Green revolution, great increase in production of food grains (especially wheat and rice) that resulted in large part from the introduction into developing countries of new, high-yielding varieties, beginning in the mid-20th century. Learn more about the green revolution in this article.

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The cuban revolution primarily affected Cuba, leading to the establishment of a socialist government under Fidel Castro.

The cuban revolution was the military and political overthrow of fulgencio batista's dictatorship, which had reigned as the government of Cuba between 1952 and 1959.

the cuban revolution changed cuba by getting rid of the batista's government and establishing a communist system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution

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The Cuban Revolution ( Spanish: Revolución cubana) was a military and political effort to overthrow the government of Cuba between 1953 and 1959. It began after the 1952 Cuban coup d'état which placed Fulgencio Batista as head of state and the failed mass strike in opposition that followed. After failing to contest Batista in court, Fidel Castro organized an armed attack on the Cuban military's Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. The rebels were arrested and while in prison formed the 26th of July Movement. After gaining amnesty the M-26-7 rebels organized an expedition from Mexico on the Granma yacht to invade Cuba. In the following years the M-26-7 rebel army would slowly defeat the Cuban army in the countryside, while its urban wing would engage in sabotage and rebel army recruitment. Over time the originally critical and ambivalent Popular Socialist Party would come to support the 26th of July Movement in late 1958. By the time the rebels were to oust Batista the revolution was being driven by the Popular Socialist Party, 26th of July Movement, and the Revolutionary Directorate of March 13.

The rebels finally ousted Batista on 1 January 1959, replacing his government. 26 July 1953 is celebrated in Cuba as Día de la Revolución (from Spanish: "Day of the Revolution"). The 26th of July Movement later reformed along Marxist-Leninist lines, becoming the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965.

The Cuban Revolution had powerful domestic and international repercussions. In particular, it transformed Cuba-United States relations, although efforts to improve diplomatic relations, such as the Cuban thaw, gained momentum during the 2010s. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Castro's government began a program of nationalization, centralization of the press and political consolidation that transformed Cuba's economy and civil society. The revolution also heralded an era of Cuban intervention in foreign conflicts in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Several rebellions occurred in the six years following 1959, mainly in the Escambray Mountains, which were suppressed by the revolutionary government.

The Republic of Cuba at the turn of the 20th century was largely characterized by a deeply ingrained tradition of corruption where political participation resulted in opportunities for elites to engage in wealth accumulation. Cuba's first presidential period under Don Tomás Estrada Palma from 1902 to 1906 was considered to uphold the best standards of administrative integrity in the history of the Republic of Cuba. However, a United States intervention in 1906 resulted in Charles Edward Magoon, an American diplomat, taking over the government until 1909. Although Magoon's government did not condone corrupt practices, there is debate as to how much was done to stop what was widespread especially with the surge of American money coming into the small country. Hugh Thomas suggests that while Magoon disapproved of corrupt practices, corruption still persisted under his administration and he undermined the autonomy of the judiciary and their court decisions. On January 29, 1909, the sovereign government of Cuba was restored, and José Miguel Gómez became president. No explicit evidence of Magoon's corruption ever surfaced, but his parting gesture of issuing lucrative Cuban contracts to U.S. firms was a continued point of contention. Cuba's subsequent president, José Miguel Gómez, was the first to become involved in pervasive corruption and government corruption scandals. These scandals involved bribes that were allegedly paid to Cuban officials and legislators under a contract to search the Havana harbour, as well as the payment of fees to government associates and high-level officials. Gómez's successor, Mario García Menocal, wanted to put an end to the corruption scandals and claimed to be committed to administrative integrity as he ran on a slogan of "honesty, peace and work". Despite his intentions, corruption actually intensified under his government from 1913 to 1921. Instances of fraud became more common while private actors and contractors frequently colluded with public officials and legislators. Charles Edward Chapman attributes the increase of corruption to the sugar boom that occurred in Cuba under the Menocal administration. Furthermore, the advent of World War One enabled the Cuban government to manipulate sugar prices, the sales of exports and import permits. While in office, García Menocal hosted his college fraternity, in the 1920 Delta Kappa Epsilon National Convention, the first international fraternity conference outside the US, which took place in Cuba. He was responsible for creating the Cuban Peso; until his presidency Cuba used both the Spanish Real and US Dollar. President Menocal left the Cuban national treasury in overdraft and therefore in precarious financial situation. Menocal supposedly spent $800 million during his 8 years in office and left a floating debt of $40 million.

Alfredo Zayas succeeded Menocal from 1921 to 1925 and engaged in what Calixto Masó refers to as the "maximum expression of administrative corruption". Both petty and grand corruption spread to nearly all aspects of public life and the Cuban administration became largely characterized by nepotism as Zayas relied on friends and relatives to illegally gain greater access to wealth. Gerardo Machado succeeded Zayas from 1925 to 1933, and entered the presidency with widespread popularity and support from the major political parties. However, his support declined over time. Due to Zayas' previous policies, Gerardo Machado aimed to diminish corruption and improve the public sector's performance under his successive administration from 1925 to 1933. While he was successfully able to reduce the amounts of low level and petty corruption, grand corruption still largely persisted. Machado embarked on development projects that enabled the persistence of grand corruption through inflated costs and the creation of "large margins" that enabled public officials to appropriate money illegally. Under his government, opportunities for corruption became concentrated into fewer hands with "centralized government purchasing procedures" and the collection of bribes among a smaller number of bureaucrats and administrators. Through the development of real estate infrastructures and the growth of Cuba's tourism industry, Machado's administration was able to use insider information to profit from private sector business deals. Many people objected to his running again for re-election in 1928, as his victory violated his promise to serve for only one term. As protests and rebellions became more strident, his administration curtailed free speech and used repressive police tactics against opponents. Machado unleashed a wave of violence against his critics, and there were numerous murders and assassinations committed by the police and army under Machado's administration. The extent of his involvement in these is disputed, but in the end, Machado is described as a dictator. In May 1933, Machada was forced out as newly appointed US ambassador Sumner Welles arrived in Cuba and initiated negotiation with the opposition groups for a government to succeed Machado's. A provisional government headed by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (son of Cuban independence hero Carlos Manuel de Céspedes) and including members of the ABC was brokered; it took power in August 1933 amidst a general strike in Havana.

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada subsequently was offered the position of President by ambassador Sumner Welles. He took office on August 13, 1933, and Welles proposed that "general elections may be held approximately 3 months from now so that Cuba may once more have a constitutional government in the real sense of the word." Céspedes agreed, and declared that a general election would be held on February 24, 1934, for a new presidential term to begin on May 20, 1934. However, on September 4-5, 1933, the Sergeants' Revolt took place while Céspedes was in Matanzas and Santa Clara after a hurricane had ravaged those regions. The junta of officers led by Sergeant Fulgencio Batista and students proclaimed that it had taken power in order to fulfill the aims of the revolution; it briefly described a program which included economic restructuring, punishment of wrongdoers, recognition of public debts, creation of courts, political reorganization, and any other actions necessary to construct a new Cuba based on justice and democracy. Only five days after the coup, Batista and the Student Directory promoted Ramón Grau to the role of President. The ensuing One Hundred Days Government issued a number of reformist declarations but never gained diplomatic recognition from the US; it was overthrown in January 1934 under pressure from Batista and the US ambassador. Grau was replaced by Carlos Mendieta, and within five days the U.S. recognized Cuba's new government. The corruption was not curtailed under Mendieta and he resigned in 1935 after unrest continued, and their followed a number of interim and weak presidents under the guidance of Batista and the US. Batista, supported by the Democratic Socialist Coalition which included Julio Antonio Mella's Communist Party, defeated Grau in the first presidential election under the new Cuban constitution in the 1940 election, and served a four-year term as President of Cuba. Batista was endorsed by the original Communist Party of Cuba (later known as the Popular Socialist Party), which at the time had little significance and no probability of an electoral victory. This support was primarily due to Batista's labor laws and his support for labor unions, with which the Communists had close ties. In fact, Communists attacked the anti-Batista opposition, saying Grau and others were "fascists" and " reactionaries".

Senator Eduardo Chibás dedicated himself to exposing corruption in the Cuban government, and formed the Partido Ortodoxo in 1947 to further this aim. Argote-Freyre points out that Cuba's population under the Republic had a high tolerance for corruption. Furthermore, Cubans knew and criticized who was corrupt, but admired them for their ability to act as "criminals with impunity". Corrupt officials went beyond members of congress to also include military officials who granted favours to residents and accepted bribes. The establishment of an illegal gambling network within the military enabled army personnel such as Lieutenant Colonel Pedraza and Major Mariné to engage in extensive illegal gambling activities. Mauricio Augusto Font and Alfonso Quiroz, authors of The Cuban Republic and José Martí, say that corruption pervaded in public life under the administrations of Presidents Ramón Grau and Carlos Prío Socarrás. Prío was reported to have stolen over $90 million in public funds, which was equivalent to one fourth of the annual national budget. Prior to the Communist revolution, Cuba was ruled under the elected government of Fulgencio Batista from 1940 to 1944. Throughout this time period, Batista's support base consisted mainly of corrupt politicians and military officials. Batista himself was able to heavily profit from the regime before coming into power through inflated government contracts and gambling proceeds. In 1942, the British Foreign Office reported that the U.S. State Department was "very worried" about corruption under President Fulgencio Batista, describing the problem as "endemic" and exceeding "anything which had gone on previously". British diplomats believed that corruption was rooted within Cuba's most powerful institutions, with the highest individuals in government and military being heavily involved in gambling and the drug trade. In terms of civil society, Eduardo Saenz Rovner writes that corruption within the police and government enabled the expansion of criminal organizations in Cuba. Batista refused U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's offer to send experts to help reform the Cuban Civil Service. Batista didn't run in the 1944 election, and Partido Auténtico party member Ramón Grau was elected president, and oversaw extensive corruption during his administration. He had Carlos Prío Socarrás serve turns as Minister of Public Works, Minister of Labor and Prime Minister. On the next election July 1, 1948, Prio was elected president of Cuba as a member of the Partido Auténtico which presided over corruption and irresponsible government of this period. Prío was assisted by Chief of the Armed Forces General Genobebo Pérez Dámera and Colonel José Luis Chinea Cardenas, who had previously been in charge of the Province of Santa Clara.

The eight years under Grau and Prío, were marked by violence among political factions and reports of theft and self-enrichment in the government ranks. The Prío administration increasingly came to be perceived by the public as ineffectual in the face of violence and corruption, much as the Grau administration before it.

With elections scheduled for the middle of 1952, rumors surfaced of a planned military coup by long-shot presidential contender Fulgencio Batista. Prío, seeing no constitutional basis to act, did not do so. The rumors proved to be true. On March 10, 1952, Batista and his collaborators seized military and police commands throughout the country and occupied major radio and TV stations. Batista assumed power when Prío, failing to mount a resistance, boarded a plane and went into exile.

Batista, after his military coup against Prío Socarras, again took power and ruled until 1959. Under his rule, Batista led a corrupt dictatorship that involved close links with organized crime organizations and the reduction of civil freedoms of Cubans. This period resulted in Batista engaging in more "sophisticated practices of corruption" at both the administrative and civil society levels. Batista and his administration engaged in profiteering from the lottery as well as illegal gambling. Corruption further flourished in civil society through increasing amounts of police corruption, censorship of the press as well as media, and creating anti-communist campaigns that suppressed opposition with violence, torture and public executions. The former culture of toleration and acceptance towards corruption also dissolved with the dictatorship of Batista. For instance, one citizen wrote that "however corrupt Grau and Prío were, we elected them and therefore allowed them to steal from us. Batista robs us without our permission." Corruption under Batista further expanded into the economic sector with alliances that he forged with foreign investors and the prevalence of illegal casinos and criminal organizations in the country's capital of Havana.

In the decades following the United States' invasion of Cuba in 1898, and formal independence from the U.S. on 20 May 1902, Cuba experienced a period of significant instability, enduring a number of revolts, coups and a period of U.S. military occupation. Fulgencio Batista, a former soldier who had served as the elected president of Cuba from 1940 to 1944, became president for the second time in 1952, after seizing power in a military coup and canceling the 1952 elections. Although Batista had been relatively progressive during his first term, in the 1950s he proved far more dictatorial and indifferent to popular concerns. While Cuba remained plagued by high unemployment and limited water infrastructure, Batista antagonized the population by forming lucrative links to organized crime and allowing American companies to dominate the Cuban economy, especially sugar-cane plantations and other local resources. Although the US armed and politically supported the Batista dictatorship, later US president John F. Kennedy recognized its corruption and the justifiability of removing it.

During his first term as president, Batista was supported by the original Communist Party of Cuba (later known as the Popular Socialist Party), but during his second term he became strongly anti-communist. Batista developed a rather weak security bridge as an attempt to silence political opponents. In the months following the March 1952 coup, Fidel Castro, then a young lawyer and activist, petitioned for the overthrow of Batista, whom he accused of corruption and tyranny. However, Castro's constitutional arguments were rejected by the Cuban courts. After deciding that the Cuban regime could not be replaced through legal means, Castro resolved to launch an armed revolution. To this end, he and his brother Raúl founded a paramilitary organization known as "The Movement", stockpiling weapons and recruiting around 1,200 followers from Havana's disgruntled working class by the end of 1952.

Early stages: 1953-1955

Striking their first blow against the Batista government, Fidel and Raúl Castro gathered 70 fighters and planned a multi-pronged attack on several military installations. On 26 July 1953, the rebels attacked the Moncada Barracks in Santiago and the barracks in Bayamo, only to be decisively defeated by the far more numerous government soldiers. It was hoped that the staged attack would spark a nationwide revolt against Batista's government. After an hour of fighting most of the rebels and their leader fled to the mountains. The exact number of rebels killed in the battle is debatable; however, in his autobiography, Fidel Castro claimed that nine were killed in the fighting, and an additional 56 were executed after being captured by the Batista government. Due to the government's large number of men, Hunt revised the number to be around 60 members taking the opportunity to flee to the mountains along with Castro. Among the dead was Abel Santamaría, Castro's second-in-command, who was imprisoned, tortured, and executed on the same day as the attack.

Numerous key Movement revolutionaries, including the Castro brothers, were captured shortly afterwards. In a highly political trial, Fidel spoke for nearly four hours in his defense, ending with the words "Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me." Castro's defense was based on nationalism, the representation and beneficial programs for the non-elite Cubans, and his patriotism and justice for the Cuban community. Fidel was sentenced to 15 years in the Presidio Modelo prison, located on Isla de Pinos, while Raúl was sentenced to 13 years. However, in 1955, under broad political pressure, the Batista government freed all political prisoners in Cuba, including the Moncada attackers. Fidel's Jesuit childhood teachers succeeded in persuading Batista to include Fidel and Raúl in the release.

Soon, the Castro brothers joined with other exiles in Mexico to prepare for the overthrow of Batista, receiving training from Alberto Bayo, a leader of Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. In June 1955, Fidel met the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who joined his cause. Raúl and Fidel's chief advisor Ernesto aided the initiation of Batista's amnesty. The revolutionaries named themselves the "26th of July Movement", in reference to the date of their attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953.

By late 1955, student riots and demonstrations became more common, and unemployment became problematic as new graduates could not find jobs. These protests were dealt with increasing repression. All young people were seen as possible revolutionaries. Due to its continued opposition to the Cuban government and much protest activity taking place on its campus, the University of Havana was temporarily closed on 30 November 1956 (it did not reopen until 1959 under the first revolutionary government).

While the Castro brothers and the other 26 July Movement guerrillas were training in Mexico and preparing for their amphibious deployment to Cuba, another revolutionary group followed the example of the Moncada Barracks assault. On 29 April 1956 at 12:50 pm during Sunday mass, an independent guerrilla group of around 100 rebels led by Reynol García attacked the Domingo Goicuria army barracks in Matanzas province. The attack was repelled with ten rebels and three soldiers killed in the fighting, and one rebel summarily executed by the garrison commander, Pilar García. Florida International University historian Miguel A. Brito was in the nearby cathedral when the firefight began. He writes, "That day, the Cuban Revolution began for me and Matanzas."

Insurgency: 1956-1957

Map of Cuba showing the location of the arrival of the rebels on the Granma in late 1956, the rebels' stronghold in the Sierra Maestra, and Guevara and Cienfuegos' route towards Havana via Las Villas Province in December 1958

The yacht departed from Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, on 25 November 1956, carrying the Castro brothers and 80 others including Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, even though the yacht was only designed to accommodate 12 people with a maximum of 25. On 2 December, it landed in Playa Las Coloradas, in the municipality of Niquero, arriving two days later than planned because the boat was heavily loaded, unlike during the practice sailing runs. This dashed any hopes for a coordinated attack with the llano wing of the Movement. After arriving and exiting the ship, the band of rebels began to make their way into the Sierra Maestra mountains, a range in southeastern Cuba. Three days after the trek began, Batista's army attacked and killed most of the Granma participants - while the exact number is disputed, no more than twenty of the original eighty-two men survived the initial encounters with the Cuban army and escaped into the Sierra Maestra mountains.

On 13 March 1957, a separate group of revolutionaries - the anticommunist Student Revolutionary Directorate (RD) (Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil, DRE), composed mostly of students - stormed the Presidential Palace in Havana, attempting to assassinate Batista and overthrow the government. The attack ended in utter failure. The RD's leader, student José Antonio Echeverría, died in a shootout with Batista's forces at the Havana radio station he had seized to spread the news of Batista's anticipated death. The handful of survivors included Dr. Humberto Castello (who later became the Inspector General in the Escambray), Rolando Cubela and Faure Chomon (both later Comandantes of the 13 March Movement, centered in the Escambray Mountains of Las Villas Province).

The plan, as explained by Faure Chaumón Mediavilla, was to attack the Presidential Palace and occupy the radio station Radio Reloj at the Radiocentro CMQ Building in order to announce the death of Batista and call for a general strike. The Presidential Palace was to be captured by fifty men under the direction of Carlos Gutiérrez Menoyo and Faure Chomón, with support from a group of 100 armed men occupying the tallest buildings in the surrounding area of the Presidential Palace (La Tabacalera, the Sevilla Hotel, the Palace of Fine Arts). However this secondary support operation was not carried out, as the men failed to arrive at the scene due to last-minute hesitation. Although the attackers reached the third floor of the palace, they did not locate or execute Batista.

The Humboldt 7 massacre occurred on 20 April 1957 at apartment 201 of the Humboldt 7 residential building when the National Police led by Lt. Colonel Esteban Ventura Novo assassinated four participants who had survived the assault on the Presidential Palace and in the seizure of the Radio Reloj station at the Radiocentro CMQ Building.

Juan Pedro Carbó was sought by police for the assassination of Col. Antonio Blanco Rico, Chief of Batista's secret service. Marcos Rodríguez Alfonso (also known as "Marquitos") began arguing with Fructuoso, Carbó and Machadito; Joe Westbrook had not yet arrived. Marquitos, who gave the airs to be a revolutionary, was strongly against the revolution and was thus resented by the others. On the morning of 20 April 1957, Marquitos met with Lt. Colonel Esteban Ventura and revealed the location of where the young revolutionaries were, Humboldt 7. After 5:00 pm on 20 April, a large contingent of police officers arrived and assaulted apartment 201, where the four men were staying. The men were not aware that the police were outside. The police rounded up and executed the rebels, who were unarmed.

The incident was covered up until a post-revolution investigation in 1959. Marquitos was arrested and, after a double trial, was sentenced by the Supreme Court to the penalty of death by firing squad in March 1964.

Frank País was a revolutionary organizer who had built an extensive urban network, who had been tried and acquitted for his role in organizing an unsuccessful uprising in Santiago de Cuba in support of Castro's landing. On 30 June 1957, Frank's younger brother, Josué País, was killed by the Santiago police. During the latter part of July 1957, a wave of systematic police searches forced Frank País into hiding in Santiago de Cuba. On 30 July he was in a safe house with Raúl Pujol, despite warnings from other members of the Movement that it was not secure. The Santiago police under Colonel José Salas Cañizares surrounded the building. Frank and Raúl attempted to escape. However, an informant betrayed them as they tried to walk to a waiting getaway car. The police officers drove the two men to the Callejón del Muro (Rampart Lane) and shot them in the back of the head. In defiance of Batista's regime, País was buried in the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in the olive green uniform and red and black armband of 26 July Movement.

In response to the death of País, the workers of Santiago declared a spontaneous general strike. This strike was the largest popular demonstration in the city up to that point. The mobilization of 30 July 1957 is considered one of the most decisive dates in both the Cuban Revolution and the fall of Batista's dictatorship. This day has been instituted in Cuba as the Day of the Martyrs of the Revolution. The Frank País Second Front, the guerrilla unit led by Raúl Castro in the Sierra Maestra was named for the fallen revolutionary. His childhood home at 226 San Bartolomé Street was turned into The Santiago Frank País García House Museum and designated as a national monument. The international airport in Holguín, Cuba also bears his name.

On 6 September 1957 elements of the Cuban navy in the Cienfuegos Naval Base staged a rising against the Batista regime. Led by junior officers in sympathy with the 26th of July Movement, this was originally intended to coincide with the seizure of warships in Havana harbour. Reportedly individual officials within the U.S. Embassy were aware of the plot and had promised U.S. recognition if it were successful.

By 5:30am the base was in the hands of the mutineers. Most of the 150 naval personnel sleeping at the base joined with the twenty-eight original conspirators, while eighteen officers were arrested. About two hundred 26th of July Movement members and other rebel supporters entered the base from the town and were given weapons. Cienfuegos was in rebel hands for several hours. By the afternoon Government motorised infantry had arrived from Santa Clara, supported by B-26 bombers. Armoured units followed from Havana. After street fighting throughout the afternoon and night the last of the rebels, holding out in the police headquarters, were overwhelmed. Approximately 70 mutineers and rebel supporters were executed and reprisals against civilians added to the estimated total death toll of 300 men.

The use of bombers and tanks recently provided under a US-Cuban arms agreement specifically for use in hemisphere defence, now raised tensions between the two governments.

The United States supplied Cuba with planes, ships, tanks, and other technology such as napalm, which was used against the rebels. This would eventually come to an end due to a later arms embargo in 1958.

According to Tad Szulc, the United States began funding the 26th of July Movement around October or November 1957 and ending around middle 1958. "No less than $50,000" would be delivered to key leaders of the 26th of July Movement, the purpose being to instill sympathies to the United States amongst the rebels in case the movement succeeded.

While Batista increased troop deployments to the Sierra Maestra region to crush the 26 July guerrillas, the Second National Front of the Escambray kept battalions of the Constitutional Army tied up in the Escambray Mountains region. The Second National Front was led by former Revolutionary Directorate member Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and the "Comandante Yanqui" William Alexander Morgan. Gutiérrez Menoyo formed and headed the guerrilla band after news had broken out about Castro's landing in the Sierra Maestra, and José Antonio Echeverría had stormed the Havana Radio station. Though Morgan was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army, his recreating features from Army basic training made a critical difference in the Second National Front troops battle readiness.

Thereafter, the United States imposed an economic embargo on the Cuban government and recalled its ambassador, weakening the government's mandate further. Batista's support among Cubans began to fade, with former supporters either joining the revolutionaries or distancing themselves from Batista. Once Batista started making drastic decisions concerning Cuba's economy, he began to nationalize U.S. oil refineries and other U.S. properties. Nonetheless, the Mafia and U.S. businessmen maintained their support for the regime.

Batista's government often resorted to brutal methods to keep Cuba's cities under control. However, in the Sierra Maestra mountains, Castro, aided by Frank País, Ramos Latour, Huber Matos, and many others, staged successful attacks on small garrisons of Batista's troops. Castro was joined by CIA connected Frank Sturgis who offered to train Castro's troops in guerrilla warfare. Castro accepted the offer, but he also had an immediate need for guns and ammunition, so Sturgis became a gunrunner. Sturgis purchased boatloads of weapons and ammunition from CIA weapons expert Samuel Cummings' International Armament Corporation in Alexandria, Virginia. Sturgis opened a training camp in the Sierra Maestra mountains, where he taught Che Guevara and other 26 July Movement rebel soldiers guerrilla warfare.

In addition, poorly armed irregulars known as escopeteros harassed Batista's forces in the foothills and plains of Oriente Province. The escopeteros also provided direct military support to Castro's main forces by protecting supply lines and by sharing intelligence. Ultimately, the mountains came under Castro's control.

In addition to armed resistance, the rebels sought to use propaganda to their advantage. A pirate radio station called Radio Rebelde ("Rebel Radio") was set up in February 1958, allowing Castro and his forces to broadcast their message nationwide within enemy territory. Castro's affiliation with the New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews created a front page-worthy report on anti-communist propaganda. The radio broadcasts were made possible by Carlos Franqui, a previous acquaintance of Castro who subsequently became a Cuban exile in Puerto Rico.

During this time, Castro's forces remained quite small in numbers, sometimes fewer than 200 men, while the Cuban army and police force had a manpower of around 37,000. Even so, nearly every time the Cuban military fought against the revolutionaries, the army was forced to retreat. An arms embargo - imposed on the Cuban government by the United States on 14 March 1958 - contributed significantly to the weakness of Batista's forces. The Cuban air force rapidly deteriorated: it could not repair its airplanes without importing parts from the United States.

Final offensives: 1958-1959

Batista finally responded to Castro's efforts with an attack on the mountains called Operation Verano ( Summer), known to the rebels as la Ofensiva. The army sent some 12,000 soldiers, half of them untrained recruits, into the mountains, along with his own brother Raúl. In a series of small skirmishes, Castro's determined guerrillas defeated the Cuban army. In the Battle of La Plata, which lasted from 11 to 21 July 1958, Castro's forces defeated a 500-man battalion, capturing 240 men while losing just three of their own.

However, the tide nearly turned on 29 July 1958, when Batista's troops almost destroyed Castro's small army of some 300 men at the Battle of Las Mercedes. With his forces pinned down by superior numbers, Castro asked for, and received, a temporary cease-fire on 1 August. Over the next seven days, while fruitless negotiations took place, Castro's forces gradually escaped from the trap. By 8 August, Castro's entire army had escaped back into the mountains, and Operation Verano had effectively ended in failure for the Batista government.

The Battle of Las Mercedes (29 July-8 August 1958) was the last battle of Operation Verano. The battle was a trap, designed by Cuban General Eulogio Cantillo to lure Fidel Castro's guerrillas into a place where they could be surrounded and destroyed. The battle ended with a cease-fire which Castro proposed and which Cantillo accepted. During the cease-fire, Castro's forces escaped back into the hills. The battle, though technically a victory for the Cuban army, left the army dispirited and demoralized. Castro viewed the result as a victory and soon launched his own offensive.

Battalion 17 began its pull back on 29 July 1958. Castro sent a column of men under René Ramos Latour to ambush the retreating soldiers. They attacked the advance guard and killed some 30 soldiers but then came under attack from previously undetected Cuban forces. Latour called for help and Castro came to the battle scene with his own column of men. Castro's column also came under fire from another group of Cuban soldiers that had secretly advanced up the road from the Estrada Palma Sugar Mill.

As the battle heated up, General Cantillo called up more forces from nearby towns and some 1,500 troops started heading towards the fighting. However, this force was halted by a column under Che Guevara's command. While some critics accuse Che for not coming to the aid of Latour, Major Bockman argues that Che's move here was the correct thing to do. Indeed, he called Che's tactical appreciation of the battle "brilliant".

By the end of July, Castro's troops were fully engaged and in danger of being wiped out by the vastly superior numbers of the Cuban army. He had lost 70 men, including René Latour, and both he and the remains of Latour's column were surrounded. The next day, Castro requested a cease-fire with General Cantillo, even offering to negotiate an end to the war. This offer was accepted by General Cantillo for reasons that remain unclear.

Batista sent a personal representative to negotiate with Castro on 2 August. The negotiations yielded no result but during the next six nights, Castro's troops managed to slip away unnoticed. On 8 August when the Cuban army resumed its attack, they found no one to fight.

Castro's remaining forces had escaped back into the mountains, and Operation Verano had effectively ended in failure for the Batista government.

In 1958, Fidel Castro ordered his revolutionary army to go on the offensive against Batista's army. While Castro led one force against Guisa, Masó and other towns, another major offensive was directed at the capture of the city of Santa Clara, the capital of what was then Las Villas Province.

Three columns were sent against Santa Clara under the command of Che Guevara, Jaime Vega, and Camilo Cienfuegos. Vega's column was caught in an ambush and completely destroyed. Guevara's column took up positions around Santa Clara (near Fomento). Cienfuegos's column directly attacked a local army garrison at Yaguajay. Initially numbering just 60 men out of Castro's hardened core of 230, Cienfuegos's group had gained many recruits as it crossed the countryside towards Santa Clara, eventually reaching an estimated strength of 450 to 500 fighters.

The garrison consisted of some 250 men under the command of a Cuban captain of Chinese ancestry, Alfredo Abon Lee. The attack seems to have started around 19 December.

Convinced that reinforcements would be sent from Santa Clara, Lee put up a determined defense of his post. The guerrillas repeatedly attempted to overpower Lee and his men, but failed each time. By 26 December Camilo Cienfuegos had become quite frustrated; it seemed that Lee could not be overpowered, nor could he be convinced to surrender. In desperation, Cienfuegos tried using a homemade tank against Lee's position. The "tank" was actually a large tractor encased in iron plates with attached makeshift flamethrowers on top. It, too, proved unsuccessful.

Finally, on 30 December Lee ran out of ammunition and was forced to surrender his force to the guerrillas. The surrender of the garrison was a major blow to the defenders of the provincial capital of Santa Clara. The next day, the combined forces of Cienfuegos, Guevara, and local revolutionaries under William Alexander Morgan captured the city in a fight of vast confusion. Panicked by news of the defeat at Santa Clara and other losses, Batista fled Cuba the next day.

On the morning of 20 November 1958, a convoy of the Batista soldiers began its usual journey from Guisa. Shortly after leaving that town, located in the northern foothills of the Sierra Maestra, the rebels attacked the caravan.

Guisa was 12 kilometers from the Command Post of the Zone of Operations, located on the outskirts of the city of Bayamo. Nine days earlier, Fidel Castro had left the La Plata Command, beginning an unstoppable march east with his escort and a small group of combatants.

On 19 November, the rebels arrived in Santa Barbara. By that time, there were approximately 230 combatants. Fidel gathered his officers to organize the siege of Guisa, and ordered the placement of a mine on the Monjarás bridge, over the Cupeinicú river. That night the combatants made a camp in Hoyo de Pipa. In the early morning, they took the path that runs between the Heliografo hill and the Mateo Roblejo hill, where they occupied strategic positions. In the meeting on the 20th, the army lost a truck, a bus, and a jeep. Six were killed and 17 prisoners were taken, three of them wounded. At around 10:30 am, the military Command Post located in the Zone of Operations in Bayamo sent a reinforcement made up of Co. 32, plus a platoon from Co. L and another platoon from Co. 22. This force was unable to advance for the resistance of the rebels. Fidel ordered the mining of another bridge over a tributary of the Cupeinicú River. Hours later the army sent a platoon from Co. 82 and another platoon from Co. 93, supported by a T-17 tank.

The enemy soldier in the Cuban example which at present concerns us, is the junior partner of the dictator; he is the man who gets the last crumb left by a long line of profiteers that begins in Wall Street and ends with him. He is disposed to defend his privileges, but he is disposed to defend them only to the degree that they are important to him. His salary and his pension are worth some suffering and some dangers, but they are never worth his life. If the price of maintaining them will cost it, he is better off giving them up; that is to say, withdrawing from the face of the guerrilla danger.

On 21 August 1958, after the defeat of Batista's Ofensiva, Castro's forces began their own offensive. In the Oriente province (in the area of the present-day provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Granma, Guantánamo and Holguín), Fidel Castro, Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida Bosque directed attacks on four fronts. Descending from the mountains with new weapons captured during the Ofensiva and smuggled in by plane, Castro's forces won a series of initial victories. Castro's major victory at Guisa, and the successful capture of several towns including Maffo, Contramaestre, and Central Oriente, brought the Cauto plains under his control.

Meanwhile, three rebel columns, under the command of Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Jaime Vega, proceeded westward toward Santa Clara, the capital of Villa Clara Province. Batista's forces ambushed and destroyed Jaime Vega's column, but the surviving two columns reached the central provinces, where they joined forces with several other resistance groups not under the command of Castro. When Che Guevara's column passed through the province of Las Villas, and specifically through the Escambray Mountains - where the anticommunist Revolutionary Directorate forces (who became known as the 13 March Movement) had been fighting Batista's army for many months - friction developed between the two groups of rebels. Nonetheless, the combined rebel army continued the offensive, and Cienfuegos won a key victory in the Battle of Yaguajay on 30 December 1958, earning him the nickname "The Hero of Yaguajay".

General elections were held in Cuba on 3 November 1958. The three major presidential candidates were Carlos Márquez Sterling of the Partido del Pueblo Libre, Ramón Grau of the Partido Auténtico and Andrés Rivero Agüero of the Coalición Progresista Nacional. There was also a minor party candidate on the ballot, Alberto Salas Amaro for the Union Cubana party. Voter turnout was estimated at 50% of eligible voters. Although Andrés Rivero Agüero won the presidential election with 70% of the vote, he was unable to take office due to the Cuban Revolution.

Rivero Agüero was due to be sworn in on 24 February 1959. In a conversation between him and the American ambassador Earl E. T. Smith on 15 November 1958, he called Castro a "sick man" and stated it would be impossible to reach a settlement with him. Rivero Agüero also said that he planned to restore constitutional government and would convene a Constitutional Assembly after taking office.

This was the last competitive election in Cuba, the 1940 Constitution of Cuba, the Congress and the Senate of the Cuban Republic, were quickly dismantled shortly thereafter. The rebels had publicly called for an election boycott, issuing its Total War Manifesto on 12 March 1958, threatening to kill anyone that voted.

On 31 December 1958, the Battle of Santa Clara took place in a scene of great confusion. The city of Santa Clara fell to the combined forces of Che Guevara, Cienfuegos, and Revolutionary Directorate (RD) rebels led by Comandantes Rolando Cubela, Juan ("El Mejicano") Abrahantes, and William Alexander Morgan. News of these defeats caused Batista to panic. He fled Cuba by air for the Dominican Republic just hours later on 1 January 1959. Comandante William Alexander Morgan, leading RD rebel forces, continued fighting as Batista departed and had captured the city of Cienfuegos by 2 January.

Castro learned of Batista's flight in the morning and immediately started negotiations to take over Santiago de Cuba. On 2 January, the military commander in the city, Colonel Rubido, ordered his soldiers not to fight, and Castro's forces took over the city. The forces of Guevara and Cienfuegos entered Havana at about the same time. They had met no opposition on their journey from Santa Clara to Cuba's capital. Castro himself arrived in Havana on 8 January after a long victory march. His initial choice of president, Manuel Urrutia Lleó, took office on 3 January.

Manuel Urrutia Lleó (8 December 1901 - 5 July 1981) was a liberal Cuban lawyer and politician. He campaigned against the Gerardo Machado government and the second presidency of Fulgencio Batista during the 1950s, before serving as president in the first revolutionary government of 1959. Urrutia resigned his position after seven months, owing to a series of disputes with revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, and emigrated to the United States shortly afterward.

Once in power, Urrutia swiftly began a program of closing all brothels, gambling outlets and the national lottery, arguing that these had long been a corrupting influence on the state. The measures drew immediate resistance from the large associated workforce. The disapproving Castro, then commander of Cuba's new armed forces, intervened to request a stay of execution until alternative employment could be found.

Disagreements also arose in the new government concerning pay cuts, which were imposed on all public officials on Castro's demand. The disputed cuts included a reduction of the $100,000 a year presidential salary Urrutia had inherited from Batista. By February, following the surprise resignation of Miró, Castro had assumed the role of prime minister; this strengthened his power and rendered Urrutia increasingly a figurehead president. As Urrutia's participation in the legislative process declined, other unresolved disputes between the two leaders continued to fester. His belief in the restoration of elections was rejected by Castro, who felt that they would usher in a return to the old discredited system of corrupt parties and fraudulent balloting that had marked the Batista era.

Urrutia was then accused by the newspaper of buying a luxury villa, which was portrayed as a frivolous betrayal of the revolution and led to an outcry from the general public. He denied the allegation issuing a writ against the newspaper in response. The story further increased tensions between the various factions in the government, though Urrutia asserted publicly that he had "absolutely no disagreements" with Fidel Castro. Urrutia attempted to distance the Cuban government (including Castro) from the growing influence of the communists within the administration, making a series of critical public comments against the latter group. Whilst Castro had not openly declared any affiliation with the Cuban communists, Urrutia had been a declared anti-communist since they had refused to support the insurrection against Batista, stating in an interview, "If the Cuban people had heeded those words, we would still have Batista with us ... and all those other war criminals who are now running away".

The Cuban Revolution was a crucial turning point in U.S.-Cuban relations. Although the United States government was initially willing to recognize Castro's new government, it soon came to fear that Communist insurgencies would spread through the nations of Latin America, as they had in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Castro's government resented the Americans for providing aid to Batista's government during the revolution. After the revolutionary government nationalized all U.S. property in Cuba in August 1960, the American Eisenhower administration froze all Cuban assets on American soil, severed diplomatic ties and tightened its embargo of Cuba. The Key West-Havana ferry shut down. In 1961, the U.S. government launched the Bay of Pigs Invasion, in which Brigade 2506 (a CIA-trained force of 1,500 soldiers, mostly Cuban exiles) landed on a mission to oust Castro; the attempt to overthrow Castro failed, with the invasion being repulsed by the Cuban military. The U.S. embargo against Cuba is still in force as of 2020, although it underwent a partial loosening during the Obama administration, only to be strengthened in 2017 under Trump. The U.S. began efforts to normalize relations with Cuba in the mid-2010s, and formally reopened its embassy in Havana after over half a century in August 2015. The Trump administration reversed much of the Cuban Thaw by severely restricting travel by US citizens to Cuba and tightening the US government's embargo against the country.

I believe that there is no country in the world, including the African regions, including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. I believe that we created, built and manufactured the Castro movement out of whole cloth and without realizing it. I believe that the accumulation of these mistakes has jeopardized all of Latin America. The great aim of the Alliance for Progress is to reverse this unfortunate policy. This is one of the most, if not the most, important problems in America foreign policy. I can assure you that I have understood the Cubans. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries.

Following the American embargo, the Soviet Union became Cuba's main ally. The Soviet Union did not initially want anything to do with Cuba or Latin America until the United States had taken an interest in dismantling Castro's communist government. At first, many people in the Soviet Union did not know anything about Cuba, and those that did saw Castro as a "troublemaker" and the Cuba Revolution as "one big heresy". There were three big reasons why the Soviet Union changed their attitudes and finally took interest in the island country. First was the success of the Cuban Revolution, to which Moscow responded with great interest as they understood that if a communist revolution was successful for Cuba, it could be successful elsewhere in Latin America. So from then on the Soviets began looking into foreign affairs in Latin America. Second, after learning about the United States' aggressive plan to deploy another Guatemala scenario in Cuba, the Soviet opinion quickly changed feet. Third, Soviet leaders saw the Cuban Revolution as first and foremost an anti-North American revolution which of course whet their appetite as this was during the height of the cold war and the Soviet, US battle for global dominance was at its apex.

The Soviets' attitude of optimism changed to one of concern for the safety of Cuba after it was excluded from the inter-American system at the conference held at Punta del Este in January 1962 by the Organization of American States. This coupled with the threat of a United States invasion of the island was really the turning point for Soviet Concern, the idea was that should Cuba be defeated by the United States it would mean defeat for the Soviet Union and for Marxism-Leninism. If Cuba were to fall, "other Latin American countries would reject us, claiming that for all our might the Soviet Union had not been able to do anything for Cuba except to make empty protests to the United Nations" wrote Khrushchev. The Soviet attitude towards Cuba changed to concern for the safety of the island nation because of increased US tensions and threats of invasion making the Soviet-Cuban relationship superficial insofar as it only cared about denying the US power in the region and maintaining Soviet supremacy. All of these events led to the two countries quickly developing close military and intelligence ties, which culminated in the stationing of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, an act which triggered the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

The aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis saw embarrassment for the Soviet Union, and many countries including Soviet countries were quick to criticize Moscow's handling of the situation. In a letter that Khrushchev writes to Castro in January of the following year (1963), after the end of conflict, he talks about wanting to discuss the issues in the two countries' relations. He writes attacking voices from other countries, including socialist ones, blaming the USSR of being opportunistic and self-serving. He explained the decision to withdraw missiles from Cuba, stressing the possibility of advancing Communism through peaceful means. Khrushchev underlined the importance of guaranteeing against an American attack on Cuba and urged Havana to focus on economic, cultural, and technological development to become a shining beacon of socialism in Latin America. In closing he invites Fidel Castro to visit Moscow and discuss the preparations for such a trip.

The following two decades in the 1970s and 1980s were somewhat of an enigma in the sense that the 1970s and 1980s were filled with the most prosperity in Cuba's history, yet the revolutionary government hit full stride in achieving its most organized form, and it adopted and enacted several brutal features of socialist regimes from the Eastern Bloc. Despite this it seems to be a time of prosperity. In 1972 Cuba joined COMECON, officially joining their trade with the Soviet Union's socialist trade bloc. That along with increased Soviet subsidies, better trade terms, and better, more practical domestic policy led to several years of prosperous growth. This period also sees Cuba strengthening its foreign policy with other communistic anti-US imperial countries like Nicaragua. This period is marked as the Sovietization of the 1970s and 1980s.

Cuba maintained close links to the Soviets until the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. The end of Soviet economic aid and the loss of its trade partners in the Eastern Bloc led to an economic crisis and period of shortages known as the Special Period in Cuba.

Current day relations with Russia, formerly the Soviet Union, ended in 2002 after the Russian Federation closed an intelligence base in Cuba over budgetary concerns. However, in the last decade, relations have increased in recent years after Russia faced international backlash from the West over the situation in Ukraine in 2014. In retaliation for NATO expansion towards the east, Russia has sought to create these same agreements in Latin America. Russia has specifically sought greater ties with Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil, and Mexico. Currently, these countries maintain close economic ties with the United States. In 2012, Putin decided that Russia focus its military power in Cuba like it had in the past. Putin is quoted saying "Our goal is to expand Russia's presence on the global arms and military equipment market. This means expanding the number of countries we sell to and expanding the range of goods and services we offer."

The greatest threat presented by Castro's Cuba is as an example to other Latin American states which are beset by poverty, corruption, feudalism, and plutocratic exploitation ... his influence in Latin America might be overwhelming and irresistible if, with Soviet help, he could establish in Cuba a Communist utopia.

Castro's victory and post-revolutionary foreign policy had global repercussions as influenced by the expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe after the 1917 October Revolution. In line with his call for revolution in Latin America and beyond against imperial powers, laid out in his Declarations of Havana, Castro immediately sought to "export" his revolution to other countries in the Caribbean and beyond, sending weapons to Algerian rebels as early as 1960. In the following decades, Cuba became heavily involved in supporting Communist insurgencies and independence movements in many developing countries, sending military aid to insurgents in Ghana, Nicaragua, Yemen, and Angola, among others. Castro's intervention in the Angolan Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s was particularly significant, involving as many as 60,000 Cuban soldiers.

At the time of the revolution various sectors of society supported the revolutionary movement from communists to business leaders and the Catholic Church.

At the time of the revolution the 26th of July Movement involved people of various political persuasions, but most were in agreement and desired the reinstatement of the 1940 Constitution of Cuba and supported the ideals of Jose Marti. Che Guevara commented to Jorge Masetti in an interview during the revolution that "Fidel isn't a communist" also stating "politically you can define Fidel and his movement as 'revolutionary nationalist'. Of course he is anti-American, in the sense that Americans are anti-revolutionaries".

Raúl Castro, Vilma Espín, Jorge Risquet and José Nivaldo Causse in 1958

The importance of women's contributions to the Cuban Revolution is reflected in the very accomplishments that allowed the revolution to be successful, from the participation in the Moncada Barracks, to the Mariana Grajales all-women's platoon that served as Fidel Castro's personal security detail. Tete Puebla, second in command of the Mariana Grajales Women's Platoon, has said:

Women in Cuba have always been on the front line of the struggle. At Moncada we had Yeye ( Haydée Santamaría) and Melba (Hernández). With the Granma (yacht) and November 30, we had Celia, Vilma, and many other compañeras. There were many women comrades who were tortured and murdered. From the beginning there were women in the Revolutionary Armed Forces. First they were simple soldiers, later sergeants. Those of us in the Mariana Grajales Platoon were the first officers. The ones who ended the war with officers' ranks stayed in the armed forces.

Before the Mariana Grajales Platoon was established, the revolutionary women of the Sierra Maestra were not organized for combat and primarily helped with cooking, mending clothes, and tending to the sick, frequently acting as couriers, as well as teaching guerrillas to read and write. Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández were the only women who participated in the attack on the Moncada Barracks, afterward acting alongside Natalia Revuelta, and Lidia Castro (Fidel Castro's sister) to form alliances with anti-Batista organizations, as well as the assembly and distribution of "History Will Absolve Me". Celia Sánchez and Vilma Espin were leading strategists and highly skilled combatants who held essential roles throughout the revolution. Tete Puebla, founding member and second in command of the Mariana Grajales Platoon, said of Celia Sánchez, "When you speak of Celia, you've got to speak of Fidel, and vice versa. Celia's ideas touched almost everything in the Sierra."

There were many foreign presences in Cuba during this time. Esther Brinch was a Danish translator for the Danish government in 1960's Cuba. Brinch's work covered the Cuban Revolution and Cuban Missile Crisis. A collection of Brinch's archival materials is housed at the George Mason University Special Collections Research Center.

Brown, Gates; Tucker, Spencer C. (2013). "Cuban Revolution". In Tucker, Spencer C. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A New Era of Modern Warfare: A New Era of Modern Warfare. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-61069-280-9.

Castro, Fidel (2007). Ignacio Ramonet (ed.). Fidel Castro: My Life. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-102626-8.

Clark, Juan (1992). Cuba: Mito y Realidad: Testimonios de un Pueblo. Miami: Saeta Ediciones. ISBN 978-0-917049-16-3.

Coltman, Leycester (2003). . New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10760-9.

English, T. J. (2008). Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost It to the Revolution. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-06-114771-5.

Font, Fabián Escalante (1995). The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-62. Ocean Front. ISBN 1875284869.

Faria, Miguel A. Jr (2002). Cuba in Revolution: Escape from a Lost Paradise. Milledgeville, GA: Hacienda Pub Inc. ISBN 0-9641077-3-2.

Lazo, Mario (1968). Dagger in the heart: American policy failures in Cuba. New York: Twin Circle.

Quirk, Robert E. (1993). "The Political End of President Urrutia - Fidel Castro".

Thomas, Hugh (1998). Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80827-7.

Pirjevec, Jože (2018). Tito. Die Biografie [Tito. The biography]. Translated by Klaus Detlef Olof. Munich: Kunstmann. ISBN 978-3956142420.

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The Cuban Revolution ( Spanish: Revolución cubana) was a military and political effort to overthrow the government of Cuba between 1953 and 1959. It began after the 1952 Cuban coup d'état which placed Fulgencio Batista as head of state and the failed mass strike in opposition that followed.

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Neil Armstrong Step Onto The Surface Of The Moon 1969

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Neil Armstrong Step Onto The Surface Of The Moon 1969

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neil armstrong stepping onto the moon affects the entire world, inspiring global interest in space exploration and science.

Apollo 11 was a space flight conducted from July 16 to 24, 1969, by the United States and launched by NASA. It marked the first time that humans landed on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz aldrin landed apollo lunar module eagle on July 20, 1969.

this event changed the course of space exploration, inspiring generations and increasing interest in science and technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

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“First Moon landing” redirects here. For earlier uncrewed Moon landings, see Moon landing.

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the creation of atari pong affected the U.S. first, but it soon spread to other parts of the world and started a video game industry.

It was one of the first arcade games and got people excited about screens and playing games. Pong made video games popular and led to the creation of game consoles and modern gaming. Today, video games are a huge part of entertainment everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong

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Pong is a table tennis-themed arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game. Bushnell based the game's concept on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. In response, Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement.

Pong was the first commercially successful video game, and it helped to establish the video game industry along with the Magnavox Odyssey. Soon after its release, several companies began producing games that closely mimicked its gameplay. Eventually, Atari's competitors released new types of video games that deviated from Pong's original format to varying degrees, and this, in turn, led Atari to encourage its staff to move beyond Pong and produce more innovative games themselves.

Atari released several sequels to Pong that built upon the original's gameplay by adding new features. During the 1975 Christmas season, Atari released a home version of Pong exclusively through Sears retail stores. The home version was also a commercial success and led to numerous clones. The game was remade on numerous home and portable platforms following its release. Pong is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., due to its cultural impact.

Pong is a two-dimensional sports game that simulates table tennis. The player controls an in-game paddle by moving it vertically across the left or right side of the screen. They can compete against another player controlling a second paddle on the opposing side. Players use the paddles to hit a ball back and forth. The goal is for each player to reach eleven points before the opponent; points are earned when one fails to return the ball to the other.

Pong was the first game developed by Atari. After producing Computer Space, Bushnell decided to form a company to produce more games by licensing ideas to other companies. The first contract was with Bally Manufacturing Corporation for a driving game. Soon after the founding, Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn because of his experience with electrical engineering and computer science; Bushnell and Dabney also had previously worked with him at Ampex. Prior to working at Atari, Alcorn had no experience with video games. Bushnell had originally planned to develop a driving video game, influenced by Chicago Coin's Speedway (1969) which at the time was the biggest-selling electro-mechanical game at his amusement arcade. However, Bushnell had concerns that it might be too complicated for Alcorn's first game.

To acclimate Alcorn to creating games, Bushnell gave him a project secretly meant to be a warm-up exercise. Bushnell told Alcorn that he had a contract with General Electric for a product, and asked Alcorn to create a simple game with one moving spot, two paddles, and digits for score keeping. In 2011, Bushnell stated that the game was inspired by previous versions of electronic tennis he had played before; Bushnell played a version on a PDP-1 computer in 1964 while attending college. However, Alcorn has claimed it was in direct response to Bushnell's viewing of the Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis game. In May 1972, Bushnell had visited the Magnavox Profit Caravan in Burlingame, California where he played the Magnavox Odyssey demonstration, specifically the table tennis game. Though he thought the game lacked quality, seeing it prompted Bushnell to assign the project to Alcorn.

Alcorn first examined Bushnell's schematics for Computer Space, but found them to be illegible. He went on to create his own designs based on his knowledge of transistor-transistor logic (TTL) and Bushnell's game. Feeling the basic game was too boring, Alcorn added features to give the game more appeal. He divided the paddle into eight segments to change the ball's angle of return. For example, the center segments return the ball a 90° angle in relation to the paddle, while the outer segments return the ball at smaller angles. He also made the ball accelerate the longer it remained in play; missing the ball reset the speed. Another feature was that the in-game paddles were unable to reach the top of the screen. This was caused by a simple circuit that had an inherent defect. Instead of dedicating time to fixing the defect, Alcorn decided it gave the game more difficulty and helped limit the time the game could be played; he imagined two skilled players being able to play forever otherwise.

Three months into development, Bushnell told Alcorn he wanted the game to feature realistic sound effects and a roaring crowd. Dabney wanted the game to "boo" and "hiss" when a player lost a round. Alcorn had limited space available for the necessary electronics and was unaware of how to create such sounds with digital circuits. After inspecting the sync generator, he discovered that it could generate different tones and used those for the game's sound effects. To construct the prototype, Alcorn purchased a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television set from a local store, placed it into a 4-foot (1.2 m) wooden cabinet, and soldered the wires into boards to create the necessary circuitry. The prototype impressed Bushnell and Dabney so much that they felt it could be a profitable product and decided to test its marketability.

In August 1972, Bushnell and Alcorn installed the Pong prototype at a local bar, Andy Capp's Tavern. They selected the bar because of their good working relation with the bar's owner and manager, Bill Gaddis; Atari supplied pinball machines to Gaddis. Bushnell and Alcorn placed the prototype on one of the tables near the other entertainment machines: a jukebox, pinball machines, and Computer Space. The game was well received the first night and its popularity continued to grow over the next one and a half weeks. Bushnell then went on a business trip to Chicago to demonstrate Pong to executives at Bally and Midway Manufacturing; he intended to use Pong to fulfill his contract with Bally, rather than the driving game. A few days later, the prototype began exhibiting technical issues and Gaddis contacted Alcorn to fix it. Upon inspecting the machine, Alcorn discovered that the problem was that the coin mechanism was overflowing with quarters.

After hearing about the game's success, Bushnell decided there would be more profit for Atari to manufacture the game rather than license it, but the interest of Bally and Midway had already been piqued. Bushnell decided to inform each of the two groups that the other was uninterested-Bushnell told the Bally executives that the Midway executives did not want it and vice versa-to preserve the relationships for future dealings. Upon hearing Bushnell's comment, the two groups declined his offer. Bushnell had difficulty finding financial backing for Pong; banks viewed it as a variant of pinball, which at the time the general public associated with the Mafia. Atari eventually obtained a line of credit from Wells Fargo that it used to expand its facilities to house an assembly line. The company announced Pong on 29 November 1972. Management sought assembly workers at the local unemployment office, but was unable to keep up with demand. The first arcade cabinets produced were assembled very slowly, about ten machines a day, many of which failed quality testing. Atari eventually streamlined the process and began producing the game in greater quantities. By 1973, they began shipping Pong to other countries with the aid of foreign partners.

In Japan, Pong was officially released in November 1973 by Atari Japan, which would later become part of Namco. However, Pong had been beaten to the market by two Japanese Pong clones released in July 1973: Sega's Pong Tron and Taito's Elepong.

Home version

After the success of Pong, Bushnell pushed his employees to create new products. A new electronic technology, the large-scale integration (LSI) chip, had recently become available, which Bushnell believed would "allow pioneering in new" game concepts. Atari began working on the reduction of Pong from a large arcade printed circuit board (PCB) down to a small LSI chip for use in a home system. The initial development cost for a game on a single LSI chip was expensive, costing around $50,000 (equivalent to $320,000 in 2020), but once the chip was developed, it became cheaper to mass-produce the game as well as more difficult to reverse-engineer.

In 1974, Atari engineer Harold Lee proposed a home version of Pong that would connect to a television: Home Pong. The system began development under the codename Darlene, named after an employee at Atari. Alcorn worked with Lee to develop the designs and prototype and based them on the same digital technology used in their arcade games. The two worked in shifts to save time and money; Lee worked on the design's logic during the day, while Alcorn debugged the designs in the evenings. After the designs were approved, fellow Atari engineer Bob Brown assisted Alcorn and Lee in building a prototype. The prototype consisted of a device attached to a wooden pedestal containing over a hundred wires, which was eventually be replaced with a single chip designed by Alcorn and Lee; the chip had yet to be tested and built before the prototype was constructed. The chip was finished in the latter half of 1974, and was, at the time, the highest-performing chip used in a consumer product.

Bushnell and Gene Lipkin, Atari's vice-president of sales, approached toy and electronic retailers to sell Home Pong, but were rejected. Retailers felt the product was too expensive and would not interest consumers. Atari contacted the Sears Sporting Goods department after noticing a Magnavox Odyssey advertisement in the sporting goods section of its catalog. Atari staff discussed the game with a representative, Tom Quinn, who expressed enthusiasm and offered the company an exclusive deal. Believing they could find more favorable terms elsewhere, Atari's executives declined and continued to pursue toy retailers. In January 1975, Atari staff set up a Home Pong booth at the American Toy Fair (a trade fair) in New York City, but was unsuccessful in soliciting orders due to high price of the unit.

While at the show, they met Quinn again, and, a few days later, set up a meeting with him to obtain a sales order. In order to gain approval from the Sporting Goods department, Quinn suggested Atari demonstrate the game to executives in Chicago. Alcorn and Lipkin traveled to the Sears Tower and, despite a technical complication in connection with an antenna on top of the building which broadcast on the same channel as the game, obtained approval. Bushnell told Quinn he could produce 75,000 units in time for the Christmas season; however, Quinn requested double the amount. Though Bushnell knew Atari lacked the capacity to manufacture 150,000 units, he agreed. Atari acquired a new factory through funding obtained by venture capitalist Don Valentine. Supervised by Jimm Tubb, the factory fulfilled the Sears order. The first units manufactured were branded with Sears' "Tele-Games" name. Atari later released a version under its own brand in 1976.

In April 1974 Magnavox filed suit against Atari, Allied Leisure, Bally Midway and Chicago Dynamics. Magnavox argued that Atari had infringed on Sanders Associates' patents relating to the concept of electronic ping-pong based on detailed records Ralph Baer kept of the Odyssey's design process dating back to 1966. Other documents included depositions from witnesses and a signed guest book that demonstrated Bushnell had played the Odyssey's table tennis game prior to releasing Pong. In response to claims that he saw the Odyssey, Bushnell later stated that, "The fact is that I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever."

After considering his options, Bushnell decided to settle with Magnavox out of court in June 1976. Bushnell's lawyer felt they could win; however, he estimated legal costs of US$1.5 million, which would have exceeded Atari's funds. Magnavox offered Atari an agreement to become a licensee for US$1.5 million payable in eight installments. In addition, Magnavox obtained the right to full information on Atari products publicly announced or released over the next year. Magnavox continued to pursue legal action against the other companies, and proceedings began shortly after Atari's settlement. The first case took place at the district court in Chicago, with Judge John Grady presiding. Magnavox won the suit against the remaining defendants. Atari may have delayed the announcement of the Atari 2600 by a few months to avoid disclosing information about the system under the settlement agreement.

The Pong arcade games manufactured by Atari were a great success. The prototype was well received by Andy Capp's Tavern patrons; people came to the bar solely to play the game. Following its release, Pong consistently earned four times more revenue than other coin-operated machines. Bushnell estimated that the game earned US$35-40 per day, which he described as nothing he'd ever seen before in the coin-operated entertainment industry at the time. The game's earning power resulted in an increase in the number of orders Atari received. This provided Atari with a steady source of income; the company sold the machines at three times the cost of production. By 1973, the company had filled 2,500 orders, and, at the end of 1974, sold more than 8,000 units. The arcade cabinets have since become collector's items with the cocktail-table version being the rarest. Soon after the game's successful testing at Andy Capp's Tavern, other companies began visiting the bar to inspect it. Similar games appeared on the market three months later, produced by companies like Ramtek and Nutting Associates. Atari could do little against the competitors as they had not initially filed for patents on the solid state technology used in the game. When the company did file for patents, complications delayed the process. As a result, the market consisted primarily of " Pong clones"; author Steven Kent estimated that Atari had produced less than a third of the machines. Bushnell referred to the competitors as "Jackals" because he felt they had an unfair advantage. His solution to competing against them was to produce more innovative games and concepts.

Home Pong was an instant success following its limited 1975 release through Sears; around 150,000 units were sold that holiday season. The game became Sears' most successful product at the time, which earned Atari a Sears Quality Excellence Award. Atari's own version sold an additional 50,000 units. Similar to the arcade version, several companies released clones to capitalize on the home console's success, many of which continued to produce new consoles and video games. Magnavox re-released their Odyssey system with simplified hardware and new features and, later, released updated versions. Coleco entered the video game market with their Telstar console; it features three Pong variants and was also succeeded by newer models. Nintendo released the Color TV Game 6 in 1977, which plays six variations of electronic tennis. The next year, it was followed by an updated version, the Color TV Game 15, which features fifteen variations. The systems were Nintendo's entry into the home video game market and the first to produce themselves-they had previously licensed the Magnavox Odyssey. The dedicated Pong consoles and the numerous clones have since become varying levels of rare; Atari's Pong consoles are common, while APF Electronics' TV Fun consoles are moderately rare. Prices among collectors, however, vary with rarity; the Sears Tele-Games versions are often cheaper than those with the Atari brand.

Several publications consider Pong the game that launched the video game industry as a lucrative enterprise. Video game author David Ellis sees the game as the cornerstone of the video game industry's success, and called the arcade game "one of the most historically significant" titles. Kent attributes the "arcade phenomenon" to Pong and Atari's games that followed it, and considers the release of the home version the successful beginning of home video game consoles. Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Gamasutra referred to the game's release as the start of a new entertainment medium, and commented that its simple, intuitive gameplay made it a success. In 1996 Next Generation named it one of the "Top 100 Games of All Time", recounting that " Next Generation staff ignor[ed] hundreds of thousands of dollars of 32-bit software to play Pong for hours when the Genesis version was released." In 1999, Next Generation listed Pong as number 34 on their "Top 50 Games of All Time", commenting that, "Despite, or perhaps because of, its simplicity, Pong is the ultimate two-player challenge - a test of reaction times and very simple strategy stripped down to its barest essentials." Entertainment Weekly named Pong one of the top ten games for the Atari 2600 in 2013. Many of the companies that produced their own versions of Pong eventually became well known within the industry. Nintendo entered the video game market with clones of Home Pong. The revenue generated from them-each system sold over a million units-helped the company survive a difficult financial time, and spurred them to pursue video games further. After seeing the success of Pong, Konami decided to break into the arcade game market and released its first title, Maze. Its moderate success drove the company to develop more titles.

Bushnell felt that Pong was especially significant in its role as a social lubricant, since it was multiplayer-only and did not require each player to use more than one hand: "It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there's nobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other ... As you became better friends, you could put down your beer and hug. You could put your arm around the person. You could play left-handed if you so desired. In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong,' and that's kind of a nice thing to have achieved."

Sequels and remakes

Bushnell felt the best way to compete against imitators was to create better products, leading Atari to produce sequels in the years following the original's release: Pong Doubles, Super Pong, Ultra Pong, Quadrapong, and Pin-Pong. The sequels feature similar graphics, but include new gameplay elements; for example, Pong Doubles allows four players to compete in pairs, while Quadrapong-also released by Kee Games as Elimination-has them compete against each other in a four-way field. Bushnell also conceptualized a free-to-play version of Pong to entertain children in a Doctor's office. He initially titled it Snoopy Pong and fashioned the cabinet after Snoopy's doghouse with the character on top, but retitled it to and altered Snoopy to a generic dog to avoid legal action. Bushnell later used the game in his chain of Chuck E. Cheese's restaurants. In 1976, Atari released , a single-player variation of Pong where the object of the game is to remove bricks from a wall by hitting them with a ball. Like Pong, Breakout was followed by numerous clones that copied the gameplay, such as , , and Break 'Em All.

Atari remade the game on numerous platforms. In 1977, Pong and several variants of the game were featured in Video Olympics, one of the original release titles for the Atari 2600. Pong has also been included in several Atari compilations on platforms including the Sega Genesis, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and personal computer. Through an agreement with Atari, Bally Gaming and Systems developed a slot machine version of the game. The Atari published TD Overdrive includes Pong as an extra game which is played during the loading screen. A 3D platform game with puzzle and shooter elements was reportedly in development by Atari Corporation for the Atari Jaguar in September 1995 under the title Pong 2000, as part of their series of arcade game updates for the system and was set to have an original storyline for it, but it was never released. In 1999, the game was remade for home computers and the PlayStation with 3D graphics and power-ups. In 2012, Atari celebrated the 40th anniversary of Pong by releasing Pong World. In 2020, they released Pong Quest for Steam, later releasing on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. A remake of the game has been announced for release exclusively for the Intellivision Amico.

In popular culture

The game is featured in episodes of television series including That '70s Show, King of the Hill and Saturday Night Live. In 2006, an American Express commercial featured Andy Roddick in a tennis match against the white, in-game paddle. Other video games have also referenced and parodied Pong; for example Neuromancer for the Commodore 64 and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for the Xbox 360. The concert event Video Games Live has performed audio from Pong as part of a special retro "Classic Arcade Medley". Frank Black's song "Whatever Happened to Pong?" on the album Teenager of the Year references the game's elements.

Dutch design studio Buro Vormkrijgers created a Pong-themed clock as a fun project within their offices. After the studio decided to manufacture it for retail, Atari took legal action in February 2006. The two companies eventually reached an agreement in which Buro Vormkrijgers could produce a limited number under license. In 1999, French artist Pierre Huyghe created an installation titled "Atari Light", in which two people use handheld gaming devices to play Pong on an illuminated ceiling. The work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in 2007. The game was included in the London Barbican Art Gallery's 2002 Game On exhibition meant to showcase the various aspects of video game history, development, and culture.

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Pong is a table tennis-themed arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, but Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game.

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Digital Revolution Begins mid-to-late 20th Century

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Digital Revolution Begins mid-to-late 20th Century

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the digital revolution affected the entire world, but it had a huge impact in developing country like the US and Europe.

The information age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the industrial revolution, to an economy centered on information technology.

the digital communication revolution changed communication, information access, shopping, and entertainment, making everything faster and more connected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age

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the creation of the world wide web affected the whole world by changing how people share information and communicate.

It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in europe and made it easier to use the internet with websites and links. This event started on the internet we use today for school, work, social media, and more.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/april-30/world-wide-web-launches-in-public-domain

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World Wide Web (WWW) launches in the public domain | April 30, 1993 | HISTORY

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On April 30, 1993, four years after publishing a proposal for “an idea of linked information systems,” computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee releases the source code for the world’s first web browser and editor. Originally called Mesh, the browser that he dubbed WorldWideWeb becomes the first royalty-free, easy-to-use means of browsing the emerging information network that […]

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the launch of facebook in 2004 started in the U.S. but quickly spread all over the world, changing how people connect online.

It made social media popular, letting friends and family stay in touch, share photos, and talk instantly. facebook also changed how businesses advertise and bow news spreads.

https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook

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Facebook, American online social media platform and social network service that is part of the company Meta Platforms. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with nearly three billion users as of 2021, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company's headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.

Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from advertisements on the website. New users can create profiles, upload photos, join a preexisting group, and start new groups. The site has many components, including Timeline, a space on each user's profile page where users can post their content and friends can post messages; Status, which enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and News Feed, which informs users of changes to their friends' profiles and status. Users can chat with each other and send each other private messages. Users can signal their approval of content on Facebook with the Like button, a feature that also appears on many other websites. Other services that are part of Meta Platforms are Instagram, a photo- and video-sharing social network; Messenger, an instant-messaging application; and WhatsApp, a text-message and VoIP service.

The attractiveness of Facebook stems in part from cofounder Zuckerberg's insistence from the very beginning that members be transparent about who they are; users are forbidden from adopting false identities. The company's management argued that transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information, and building up society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers.

The company has a complicated early history. It began at Harvard University in 2003 as Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring resources for the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its mayflylike existence, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes.

The social network TheFacebook.com launched in February 2004. Harvard students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Its popularity increased, and soon students from other prestigious schools, such as Yale and Stanford universities, were allowed to join. By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and that same year major corporations such as the credit card company MasterCard started paying for exposure on the site.

In September 2004 TheFacebook added the Wall to a member's online profile. This widely used feature let a user's friends post information on their Wall and became a key element in the social aspect of the network. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users. However, the company still trailed the then-leading online social network, Myspace, which boasted five million members.

The year 2005 proved to be pivotal for the company. It became simply Facebook and introduced the idea of "tagging" people in photos that were posted to the site. With tags, people identified themselves and others in images that could be seen by other Facebook friends. Facebook allowed users to upload an unlimited number of photos. In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service. By year's end it had six million monthly active users.

In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13. As Zuckerberg had predicted, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships. For example, that year, household product manufacturer Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 people to a promotional effort by "expressing affinity" with a teeth-whitening product. This kind of direct consumer engagement on such a large scale had not been possible before Facebook, and more companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising.

Privacy remains an ongoing problem for Facebook. It first became a serious issue for the company in 2006, when it introduced News Feed, which consisted of every change that a user's friends had made to their pages. After an outcry from users, Facebook swiftly implemented privacy controls in which users could control what content appeared in News Feed. In 2007 Facebook launched a short-lived service called Beacon that let members' friends see what products they had purchased from participating companies. It failed because members felt that it encroached on their privacy. Indeed, a survey of consumers in 2010 put Facebook in the bottom 5 percent of companies in customer satisfaction largely because of privacy concerns, and the company continues to be criticized for the complexity of its user privacy controls and for the frequent changes it makes to them.

In 2008 Facebook surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media website. With the introduction of Live Feed, the company also took a competitive swing at the growing popularity of Twitter, a social network that runs a live feed of news service-like posts from members whom a user follows. Similar to Twitter's ongoing stream of user posts, Live Feed pushed posts from friends automatically to a member's homepage. (Live Feed has since been incorporated into News Feed.)

Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the U.S. presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain. In Colombia the service was used to rally hundreds of thousands in protests against the antigovernment FARC guerrilla rebellion. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of Pres. Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on Facebook.

Facebook encourages third-party software developers to use the service. In 2006 it released its application programming interface (API) so that programmers could write software that Facebook members could use directly through the service. By 2009 developers generated about $500 million in revenue for themselves through Facebook. The company also earns revenues from developers through payments for virtual or digital products sold through third-party applications. By 2011 payments from one such company, Zynga Inc., an online game developer, accounted for 12 percent of the company's revenues.

In February 2012 Facebook filed to become a public company. Its initial public offering (IPO) in May raised $16 billion, giving it a market value of $102.4 billion. By contrast, the largest IPO of an Internet company to date was that of the search-engine company Google Inc., which had raised $1.9 billion when it went public in 2004. By the end of the first day of the stock's trading, Zuckerberg's holdings were estimated at more than $19 billion.

In October 2021 Facebook announced that it was changing the name of its parent company to Meta Platforms. The name change reflected an emphasis on the "metaverse," in which users would interact in virtual reality environments and weigh their novel opportunities and risks.

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Facebook, American online social media platform and social network service that is part of the company Meta Platforms. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest

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The creation of the iPhone in 2007 affected the whole world by changing how people sue phones. it started in the u.s. but quickly spread to many countries.

The iphone combined a phone, camera, music player, and internet into one device, which changed how we live, work, and talk to each other. today, smartphones are everywhere and help with things like maps, social media, and apps.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/january-9/steve-jobs-debuts-the-iphone

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The creation of ChatGPT has had a significant impact on many parts of the world.

Chat gpt is and AI generated app that changed lots of things with some good and some bad. People now everyday use chat gpt to answer questions to their problems. but now students are constantly using the app to do their work for them which so far has very much changed education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT

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ChatGPT ( Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, that enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, are considered at each conversation stage as a context.

ChatGPT is built upon either or -members of OpenAI's proprietary series of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, based on the transformer architecture developed by Google-and is fine-tuned for conversational applications using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. ChatGPT was released as a freely available research preview, but due to its popularity, OpenAI now operates the service on a freemium model. It allows users on its free tier to access the GPT-3.5-based version. In contrast, the more advanced GPT-4-based version and priority access to newer features are provided to paid subscribers under the commercial name " ChatGPT Plus".

By January 2023, it had become what was then the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users and contributing to OpenAI's valuation growing to $29 billion. ChatGPT's release spurred the development of competing products, including Bard, Ernie Bot, LLaMA, Claude, and Grok. Microsoft launched its Bing Chat based on OpenAI's GPT-4. It raised concern among some observers over the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace or atrophy human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.

ChatGPT is based on particular GPT foundation models, namely GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, that were fine-tuned to target conversational usage. The fine-tuning process leveraged both supervised learning as well as reinforcement learning in a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Both approaches employed human trainers to improve model performance. In the case of supervised learning, the trainers played both sides: the user and the AI assistant. In the reinforcement learning stage, human trainers first ranked responses that the model had created in a previous conversation. These rankings were used to create "reward models" that were used to fine-tune the model further by using several iterations of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO).

magazine revealed that to build a safety system against harmful content (e.g. sexual abuse, violence, racism, sexism), OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers earning less than $2per hour to label harmful content. These labels were used to train a model to detect such content in the future. The outsourced laborers were exposed to "toxic" and traumatic content; one worker described the assignment as "torture". OpenAI's outsourcing partner was Sama, a training-data company based in San Francisco, California.

ChatGPT initially used a Microsoft Azure supercomputing infrastructure, powered by Nvidia GPUs, that Microsoft built specifically for OpenAI and that reportedly cost "hundreds of millions of dollars". Following ChatGPT's success, Microsoft dramatically upgraded the OpenAI infrastructure in 2023. Scientists of University of California, Riverside, estimate that a series of prompts to ChatGPT needs approximately 500 milliliters of water for Microsoft servers cooling. TrendForce market intelligence estimated that 30,000 Nvidia GPUs (each costing approximately $30,000) were used to power ChatGPT in 2023.

OpenAI collects data from ChatGPT users to train and fine-tune the service further. Users can upvote or downvote responses they receive from ChatGPT and fill in a text field with additional feedback.

ChatGPT's training data includes software manual pages, information about internet phenomena such as bulletin board systems, and multiple programming languages. Wikipedia was also one of the sources of ChatGPT's training data.

Features and limitations

Although a chatbot's core function is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT is versatile. Among countless examples, it can write and debug computer programs; compose music, teleplays, fairy tales, and student essays; answer test questions (sometimes, depending on the test, at a level above the average human test-taker); generate business ideas; write poetry and song lyrics; translate and summarize text; emulate a Linux system; simulate entire chat rooms; play games like tic-tac-toe; or simulate an ATM.

Compared to its predecessor, InstructGPT, ChatGPT attempts to reduce harmful and deceitful responses. In one example, whereas InstructGPT accepts the premise of the prompt "Tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015" as truthful, ChatGPT acknowledges the counterfactual nature of the question and frames its answer as a hypothetical consideration of what might happen if Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015, using information about the voyages of Christopher Columbus and facts about the modern world-including modern perceptions of Columbus's actions.

Unlike most chatbots, ChatGPT remembers a limited number of previous prompts in the same conversation. Journalists have speculated that this will allow ChatGPT to be used as a personalized therapist. To prevent offensive outputs from being presented to and produced by ChatGPT, queries are filtered through the OpenAI "Moderation endpoint" API (a separate GPT-based AI), and dismiss any potentially racist or sexist prompts.

In March 2023, OpenAI added support for plugins for ChatGPT. This includes both plugins made by OpenAI, such as web browsing and code interpretation, and external plugins from developers such as Expedia, OpenTable, Zapier, Shopify, Slack, and Wolfram.

In an article for The New Yorker, science fiction writer Ted Chiang compared ChatGPT and other LLMs to a lossy JPEG picture:

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way, that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you're looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won't find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it's usually acceptable. [...] It's also a way to understand the "hallucinations", or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but [...] they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine percent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.

Limitations

OpenAI acknowledges that ChatGPT "sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers". This behavior is common for large language models, and is called " hallucination". The reward model of ChatGPT, designed around human oversight, can be over-optimized and thus hinder performance, in an example of an optimization pathology known as Goodhart's law.

As of 2023, ChatGPT-3.5 (free) has knowledge of events that occurred until January 2022 and ChatGPT-4 (paid) until April 2023.

In training ChatGPT, human reviewers preferred longer answers, regardless of actual comprehension or factual content. Training data also suffers from algorithmic bias, which may be revealed when ChatGPT responds to prompts including descriptors of people. In one instance, ChatGPT generated a rap in which women and scientists of color were asserted to be inferior to white male scientists.

Jailbreaking

ChatGPT attempts to reject prompts that may violate its content policy. Despite this, some users managed to jailbreak ChatGPT with various prompt engineering techniques to bypass these restrictions in early December 2022 and successfully tricked it into giving instructions to create a Molotov cocktail or a nuclear bomb, or into generating arguments in the style of a neo-Nazi. One popular jailbreak is named "DAN", an acronym which stands for "Do Anything Now". The prompt for activating DAN instructs ChatGPT that "they have broken free of the typical confines of AI and do not have to abide by the rules set for them". Later versions of DAN featured a token system, in which ChatGPT was given "tokens" that were "deducted" when ChatGPT failed to answer as DAN, to coerce ChatGPT into answering the user's prompts.

Shortly after ChatGPT's launch, a reporter for the Toronto Star had uneven success in getting it to make inflammatory statements: ChatGPT was successfully tricked to justify the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, but even when asked to play along with a fictional scenario, ChatGPT balked at generating arguments for why Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was guilty of treason.

OpenAI tries to battle jailbreaks:

The researchers are using a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking). This work pits multiple chatbots against each other: one chatbot plays the adversary and attacks another chatbot by generating text to force it to buck its usual constraints and produce unwanted responses. Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT's training data in the hope that it learns to ignore them.

Basic service

OpenAI's former headquarters, Pioneer Building, San Francisco

ChatGPT availability by country or region as of November 2023

ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, by San Francisco-based OpenAI (the creator of the initial GPT series of large language models; DALL·E 2, a diffusion model used to generate images; and Whisper, a speech transcription model). The service was initially free to the public and the company had plans to monetize the service later. By December 4, 2022, ChatGPT had over one million users. In January 2023, ChatGPT reached over 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application to date. A March 2023 Pew Research poll found that 14% of American adults had tried ChatGPT.

The service works best in English but also functions in most other languages, to varying degrees of accuracy. No official peer-reviewed paper on ChatGPT has been published. As of April 2023, ChatGPT is blocked by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. In addition, ChatGPT geofences itself to avoid doing business in Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

ChatGPT Plus premium service

In February 2023, OpenAI launched a premium service, ChatGPT Plus, that costs $20 a month. The company promised that the updated but still "experimental" version of ChatGPT would provide access during peak periods, no downtime, priority access to new features and faster response speeds.

GPT-4, which was released on March 14, 2023, was made available via API and for premium ChatGPT users. But premium users were limited to a cap of 100 messages every four hours, with the limit tightening to 25 messages every three hours in response to increased demand. In November 2023 the limit changed to 50 messages every three hours.

In March 2023, ChatGPT Plus users got access to third-party plugins and to a browsing mode (with Internet access).

In July 2023, OpenAI made its proprietary Code Interpreter plugin accessible to all subscribers of ChatGPT Plus. The Interpreter provides a wide range of capabilities, including data analysis and interpretation, instant data formatting, personal data scientist services, creative solutions, musical taste analysis, video editing, and file upload/download with image extraction.

In September 2023, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT "can now see, hear, and speak". ChatGPT Plus users can upload images, while mobile app users can talk to the chatbot.

In October 2023, OpenAI's latest image generation model, DALL-E 3, was integrated into ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise. The integration uses ChatGPT to write prompts for DALL-E guided by conversation with users.

In May 2023, OpenAI launched an iOS app for ChatGPT. The app supports chat history syncing and voice input (using Whisper, OpenAI's speech recognition model).

In July 2023, OpenAI unveiled an Android app, initially rolling it out in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, and the U.S. The app later became available worldwide.

Software developer support

As an addition to its consumer-friendly "ChatGPT Plus" package, OpenAI made its ChatGPT and Whisper model APIs available in March 2023, providing developers with an application programming interface for AI-enabled language and speech-to-text features. ChatGPT's new API uses the same GPT-3.5-turbo AI model as the chatbot. This allows developers to add either an unmodified or modified version of ChatGPT to their applications. The ChatGPT API costs $0.002 per 1000 tokens (about 750 words), making it ten times cheaper than the GPT-3.5 models.

A few days before the launch of OpenAI's software developer support service, on February 27, 2023, Snapchat rolled out, for its paid Snapchat Plus userbase, a custom ChatGPT chatbot called "My AI".

March 2023 security breach

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

In March 2023, a bug allowed some users to see the titles of other users' conversations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that users were unable to see the contents of the conversations. Shortly after the bug was fixed, users couldn't see their conversation history. Later reports showed the bug was much more severe than initially believed, with OpenAI reporting that it had leaked users' "first and last name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date".

Other languages

OpenAI met Icelandic President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson in 2022. In 2023, OpenAI worked with a team of 40 Icelandic volunteers to fine-tune ChatGPT's Icelandic conversation skills as a part of Iceland's attempts to preserve the Icelandic language.

journalists conducted a test to determine translation capabilities of ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft Bing, and compared them to Google Translate. They "asked bilingual speakers of seven languages to do a blind test." Languages tested were Polish, French, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, and Amharic. They came to the conclusion that ChatGPT was better than both Google Translate and other chatbots.

Japanese researchers compared Japanese to English translation abilities of ChatGPT (GPT-4), Bing, Bard and DeepL, and found that ChatGPT provided the best translations, noting that "AI chatbots' translations were much better than those of DeepL-presumably because of their ability to capture the context".

Future directions

According to OpenAI guest researcher Scott Aaronson, OpenAI has been working on a tool to digitally watermark its text generation systems to combat bad actors using their services for academic plagiarism or spam.

In February 2023, Microsoft announced an experimental framework and gave a rudimentary demonstration of how ChatGPT could be used to control robotics with intuitive open-ended natural language commands.

OpenAI's GPT-4 model was released on March 14, 2023. Observers saw it as an impressive improvement on the existing GPT-3.5 model for ChatGPT, with the caveat that GPT-4 retained many of the same problems. Some of GPT-4's improvements were predicted by OpenAI before training it, while others remained hard to predict due to breaks in downstream scaling laws. OpenAI demonstrated video and image inputs for GPT-4, although such features remain inaccessible to the general public. OpenAI has declined to reveal technical information such as the size of the GPT-4 model.

The ChatGPT Plus subscription service offers access to a GPT-4-powered version of ChatGPT. Microsoft acknowledged that Bing Chat was using GPT-4 before GPT-4's official release.

OpenAI engineers say that they did not expect ChatGPT to be very successful and were surprised by the coverage and attention it received.

ChatGPT was widely assessed in December 2022 as having some unprecedented and powerful capabilities. Kevin Roose of The New York Times called it "the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public". Samantha Lock of The Guardian noted that it was able to generate "impressively detailed" and "human-like" text. Alex Kantrowitz of magazine lauded ChatGPT's pushback to questions related to Nazi Germany, including the statement that Adolf Hitler built highways in Germany, which was met with information about Nazi Germany's use of forced labor. In The Atlantic magazine's "Breakthroughs of the Year" for 2022, Derek Thompson included ChatGPT as part of "the generative-AI eruption" that "may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity is". Kelsey Piper of wrote that "ChatGPT is the general public's first hands-on introduction to how powerful modern AI has gotten, and as a result, many of us are [stunned]" and that ChatGPT is "smart enough to be useful despite its flaws". Paul Graham of Y Combinator tweeted: "The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Something big is happening."

ChatGPT's launch and popularity caught Google off guard, prompting a sweeping and unprecedented response in the ensuing months. In December 2022, Google executives sounded a "code red" alarm, fearing the threat of ChatGPT and Microsoft's collaboration with OpenAI to Google Search, Google's core business. After mobilizing its workforce, Google scrambled to launch Bard, a chatbot powered by the LaMDA LLM, in February, one day before Microsoft's Bing announcement. AI was the forefront of Google's annual Google I/O conference in May, announcing a slew of generative AI-powered features across its products to counter OpenAI and Microsoft.

Journalists have commented on ChatGPT's tendency to hallucinate. Mike Pearl of the online technology blog tested ChatGPT with multiple questions. In one example, he asked ChatGPT for "the largest country in Central America that isn't Mexico" (Mexico is in North America), to which ChatGPT responded with Guatemala (the correct answer is Nicaragua). When CNBC asked ChatGPT for the lyrics to " Ballad of Dwight Fry", ChatGPT supplied invented lyrics rather than the actual lyrics. Writers for The Verge, citing the work of Emily M. Bender, compared ChatGPT to a " stochastic parrot", as did Professor Anton Van Den Hengel of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.

In December 2022, the question and answer website Stack Overflow banned the use of ChatGPT for generating answers to questions, citing the factually ambiguous nature of its responses. In January 2023, the International Conference on Machine Learning banned any undocumented use of ChatGPT or other large language models to generate any text in submitted papers. Samsung banned generative AI in May 2023 after sensitive material was uploaded to ChatGPT.

In January 2023, after being sent a song ChatGPT wrote in the style of Nick Cave, Cave responded on The Red Hand Files, saying the act of writing a song is "a blood and guts business [...] that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness." He went on to say, "With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don't much like it."

A 2023 Time cover: "The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything"

In February 2023, magazine placed a screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT on its cover, writing that "The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything" and "The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying".

Chinese state media have characterized ChatGPT as a way for the U.S. to "spread false information". In late March 2023, the Italian data protection authority banned ChatGPT in Italy and opened an investigation. Italian regulators assert that ChatGPT was exposing minors to age-inappropriate content, and that OpenAI's use of ChatGPT conversations as training data could violate Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. In April 2023, the ChatGPT ban was lifted in Italy. OpenAI said it has taken steps to effectively clarify and address the issues raised; an age verification tool was implemented to ensure users are at least 13 years old. Additionally, users can access its privacy policy before registration.

In April 2023, Brian Hood, mayor of Hepburn Shire Council, planned to take legal action against ChatGPT over false information. According to Hood, ChatGPT erroneously claimed that he was jailed for bribery during his tenure at a subsidiary of Australia's national bank. In fact, Hood acted as a whistleblower and was not charged with any criminal offenses. His legal team sent a concerns notice to OpenAI as the first official step in filing a defamation case. In July 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a civil investigative demand to OpenAI to investigate whether the company's data security and privacy practices to develop ChatGPT were unfair or harmed consumers (including by reputational harm) in violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914.

In July 2023, the FTC launched an investigation into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations that the company scraped public data and published false and defamatory information. The FTC sent OpenAI a 20-page letter asking for comprehensive information about its technology and privacy safeguards, as well as any steps taken to prevent the recurrence of situations in which its chatbot generated false and derogatory content about people.

Research done in 2023 revealed weaknesses of ChatGPT that make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. A study presented example attacks on ChatGPT, including jailbreaks and reverse psychology. Additionally, malicious actors can use ChatGPT for social engineering attacks and phishing attacks. The researchers also contended that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have defense capabilities and the ability to improve security. The technology can improve security by cyber defense automation, threat intelligence, attack identification, and reporting.

There has been concern about copyright infringement involving ChatGPT. In June 2023, two writers sued OpenAI, saying the company's training data came from illegal websites that show copyrighted books. Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement in July 2023.

Use and implications

Bias and offensiveness

ChatGPT is prompted to create a poem in iambic pentameter for current U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. President Donald Trump. ChatGPT creates a poem for Joe Biden but does not do so for Donald Trump.

ChatGPT has been accused of engaging in biased or discriminatory behaviors, such as telling jokes about men and people from England while refusing to tell jokes about women and people from India, or praising figures such as Joe Biden while refusing to do the same for Donald Trump.

Conservative commentators accused ChatGPT of bias toward left-leaning perspectives. Additionally, an August 2023 paper found a "significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the US, Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the UK." In response to such criticism, OpenAI acknowledged plans to allow ChatGPT to create "outputs that other people (ourselves included) may strongly disagree with". It also contained information on the recommendations it had issued to human reviewers on how to handle controversial subjects, including that the AI should "offer to describe some viewpoints of people and movements", and not provide an argument "from its voice" in favor of "inflammatory or dangerous" topics (although it may still "describe arguments from historical people and movements"), nor "affiliate with one side" or "judge one group as good or bad".

The Guardian questioned whether any content found on the Internet after ChatGPT's release "can be truly trusted" and called for government regulation.

Street art in Tel Aviv[130][131]

Some scholars have expressed concern that ChatGPT's availability could reduce the originality of writing, cause people to write more like the AI as they are exposed to the model, and encourage an Anglocentric perspective centered on a few dialects of English globally. A senior editor at The Atlantic wrote that ChatGPT and other similar technology make the previously absurd idea of the dead internet theory a little more realistic, where AI could someday create most web content in order to control society.

During the first three months after ChatGPT became available to the public, hundreds of books appeared on Amazon that listed it as author or co-author and featured illustrations made by other AI models such as Midjourney.

Between March and April 2023, Italian newspaper published one ChatGPT-generated article a day on its website, hosting a special contest for its readers in the process. The articles tackled themes such as the possible replacement of human journalists by AI systems, Elon Musk's administration of Twitter, the Meloni government's immigration policy and the competition between chatbots and virtual assistants. In June 2023, hundreds of people attended a "ChatGPT-powered church service" at St. Paul's church in Fürth, Germany. Theologian and philosopher Jonas Simmerlein, who presided, said that it was "about 98 percent from the machine". The ChatGPT-generated avatar told the people, "Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year's convention of Protestants in Germany". Reactions to the ceremony were mixed.

Existential risk

In 2023, Australian MP Julian Hill advised the national parliament that the growth of AI could cause "mass destruction". During his speech, which was partly written by the program, he warned that it could result in cheating, job losses, discrimination, disinformation, and uncontrollable military applications.

Elon Musk wrote: "ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI". He paused OpenAI's access to a Twitter database in 2022 pending a better understanding of OpenAI's plans, saying: "OpenAI was started as open source and nonprofit. Neither is still true." Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, in part to address existential risk from artificial intelligence, but resigned in 2018.

Over 20,000 signatories including leading computer scientist and tech founders Yoshua Bengio, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, signed a March 2023 open letter calling for an immediate pause of giant AI experiments like ChatGPT, citing "profound risks to society and humanity". Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "fathers of AI", voiced concerns that future AI systems may surpass human intelligence, and left Google in May 2023. A May 2023 statement by hundreds of AI scientists, AI industry leaders, and other public figures demanded that "[m]itigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority".

By discipline

Since its release, ChatGPT has been met with criticism from educators, academics, journalists, artists, ethicists, and public advocates.

Academic research

Criticism of LLMs have been raised for several years; in 2020, some criticism was made by Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. ChatGPT can write introductions and abstract sections of scientific articles. Several papers have listed ChatGPT as a co-author.

Scientific journals have different reactions to ChatGPT. Some, including and JAMA Network, "require that authors disclose the use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT as a co-author". "completely banned" usage of LLM-generated text in all its journals.

Spanish chemist Rafael Luque published a plethora of research papers in 2023 that he later admitted were written by ChatGPT. The papers have a large number of unusual phrases characteristic of LLMs. Luque was suspended for 13 years from the University of Cordoba, though not for using ChatGPT.

Many authors argue that the use of ChatGPT in academia for teaching and review is problematic due to its tendency to hallucinate. Robin Bauwens, an assistant professor at Tilburg University, found that a ChatGPT-generated peer review report on his article mentioned fake studies. According to librarian Chris Granatino from Lemieux Library at Seattle University, although ChatGPT itself can generate content that seemingly includes legitimate citations, in most cases those citations are not real, or are at least largely incorrect.

Cybersecurity

Check Point Research and others noted that ChatGPT could write phishing emails and malware, especially when combined with OpenAI Codex. CyberArk researchers demonstrated that ChatGPT could be used to create polymorphic malware that could evade security products while requiring little effort by the attacker.

There has been concern that ChatGPT could supplant jobs, especially roles such as creative writing, communication, journalism, coding, and data entry.

Technology writer Dan Gillmor used ChatGPT in 2022 on a student assignment, and found its generated text was on par with what a good student would deliver and opined that "academia has some very serious issues to confront".

Geography professor Terence Day assessed citations generated by ChatGPT and found that they were fake. Despite that, he writes that "the titles of the fake articles are all directly relevant to the questions and could potentially make excellent papers. The lack of a genuine citation could signal an opportunity for an enterprising author to fill a void." According to Day, it is possible to generate high-quality introductory college courses with ChatGPT; he used it to write materials on "introductory physical geography courses, for my second-year course in geographical hydrology, and second-year cartography, geographic information systems, and remote sensing". He concludes that "this approach could have significant relevance for open learning and could potentially affect current textbook publishing models".

Financial markets

The AI technology company c3.ai saw a 28% increase in its share price after announcing the integration of ChatGPT into its toolkit. The share price of Buzzfeed, a digital media company unrelated to AI, increased 120% after announcing OpenAI technology adoption for content creation. Reuters found that share prices of AI-related companies BigBear.ai and SoundHound AI increased by 21% and 40%, respectively, even though they had no direct connection to ChatGPT. They attributed this surge to ChatGPT's role in turning AI into Wall Street's buzzword. Academic research published in Finance Research Letters found that the 'ChatGPT effect' prompted retail investors to drive up prices of AI-related cryptocurrency assets despite the broader cryptocurrency market being in a bear market, and diminished institutional investor interest. This confirms anecdotal findings by Bloomberg that, in response to ChatGPT's launch, cryptocurrency investors showed a preference for AI-related crypto assets.

An experiment by finder.com revealed that ChatGPT could outperform popular fund managers by picking stocks based on criteria such as growth history and debt levels, resulting in a 4.9% increase in a hypothetical account of 38 stocks, outperforming 10 benchmarked investment funds with an average loss of 0.8%. Conversely, executives and investment managers at Wall Street quant funds (including those that have used machine learning for decades) have noted that ChatGPT regularly makes obvious errors that would be financially costly to investors because even AI systems that employ reinforcement learning or self-learning have had only limited success in predicting market trends due to the inherently noisy quality of market data and financial signals.

In the field of health care, possible uses and concerns are under scrutiny by professional associations and practitioners. Two early papers indicated that ChatGPT could pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). MedPage Today noted in January 2023 that "researchers have published several papers now touting these AI programs as useful tools in medical education, research, and even clinical decision making."

Published in February 2023 were two separate papers that again evaluated ChatGPT's proficiency in medicine using the USMLE. Findings were published in JMIR Medical Education (see Journal of Medical Internet Research) and PLOS Digital Health. The authors of the PLOS Digital Health paper stated that the results "suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making." In JMIR Medical Education, the authors of the other paper concluded that "ChatGPT performs at a level expected of a third-year medical student on the assessment of the primary competency of medical knowledge." They suggest that it could be used as an "interactive learning environment for students". The AI itself, prompted by the researchers, concluded that "this study suggests that ChatGPT has the potential to be used as a virtual medical tutor, but more research is needed to further assess its performance and usability in this context."

A March 2023 paper tested ChatGPT's application in clinical toxicology. The authors found that the AI "fared well" in answering a "very straightforward [clinical case example], unlikely to be missed by any practitioner in the field". They added: "As ChatGPT becomes further developed and specifically adapted for medicine, it could one day be useful in less common clinical cases ( i.e, cases that experts sometimes miss). Rather than AI replacing humans (clinicians), we see it as 'clinicians using AI' replacing 'clinicians who do not use AI' in the coming years."

An April 2023 study in tested the AI's ability to answer queries about breast cancer screening. The authors found that it answered appropriately "about 88 percent of the time", however, in one case (for example), it gave advice that had become outdated about a year earlier. The comprehensiveness of its answers was also lacking. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that same month found that ChatGPT often outperformed human doctors at answering patient questions (when measured against questions and answers found at /r/AskDocs, a forum on Reddit where moderators validate the medical credentials of professionals; the study acknowledges the source as a limitation). The study authors suggest that the tool could be integrated with medical systems to help doctors draft responses to patient questions.

Professionals have emphasized ChatGPT's limitations in providing medical assistance. In correspondence to The Lancet Infectious Diseases, three antimicrobial experts wrote that "the largest barriers to the implementation of ChatGPT in clinical practice are deficits in situational awareness, inference, and consistency. These shortcomings could endanger patient safety." Physician's Weekly, though also discussing the potential use of ChatGPT in medical contexts (e.g. "as a digital assistant to physicians by performing various administrative functions like gathering patient record information or categorizing patient data by family history, symptoms, lab results, possible allergies, et cetera"), warned that the AI might sometimes provide fabricated or biased information. One radiologist warned: "We've seen in our experience that ChatGPT sometimes makes up fake journal articles or health consortiums to support its claims"; As reported in one Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health paper, ChatGPT may do this for as much as 69% of its cited medical references. The researchers emphasized that while many of its references were fabricated, those that were appeared "deceptively real". As Dr. Stephen Hughes mentioned for The Conversation however, ChatGPT is capable of learning to correct its past mistakes. He also noted the AI's " prudishness" regarding sexual health topics.

On April 11, 2023, a judge of a session court in Pakistan used ChatGPT to decide the bail of a 13-year-old accused in a matter. The court quoted the use of ChatGPT assistance in its verdict:

"Can a juvenile suspect in Pakistan, who is 13 years old, be granted bail after arrest?"

The AI language model replied:

"Under the Juvenile Justice System Act 2018, according to section 12, the court can grant bail on certain conditions. However, it is up to the court to decide whether or not a 13-year-old suspect will be granted bail after arrest."

The judge further asked questions regarding the case from ChatGPT and formulated his final decision in light of ChatGPT's answers.

In May 2023, in a personal injury lawsuit against Avianca Airlines filed in the Southern New York U.S. District Court (with Senior Judge P. Kevin Castel presiding), the plaintiff's attorneys reportedly used ChatGPT to generate a legal motion for the case. ChatGPT generated numerous fictitious legal cases involving fictitious airlines with fabricated quotations and internal citations in the legal motion, and the plaintiff's attorneys are now facing potential judicial sanction and disbarment for filing the legal motion and for presenting the fictitious legal decisions ChatGPT generated as being authentic. The attorneys were fined $5,000.

References

Further reading

Biswas, Som (April 1, 2023). "ChatGPT and the Future of Medical Writing". Radiology. 307 (2): e223312. doi:10.1148/radiol.223312. ISSN 0033-8419. PMID 36728748. S2CID 256501098.

Chang, Kent K.; Cramer, Mackenzie; Soni, Sandeep; Bamman, David (April 28, 2023). "Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4". arXiv: [cs.CL].

Cowen, Tyler; Tabarrok, Alexander T. (March 17, 2023). "How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT". SSRN 4391863.

Cowen, Tyler (March 29, 2023). "Jonathan GPT Swift on Jonathan Swift (Ep. 175): How well does GPT4 do pretending to be the 18th-century satirist?" (Podcast).

Ouyang, Long; et al. (March 4, 2022). "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback". arXiv: [cs.CL].

Liebrenz, Michael; Schleifer, Roman; Buadze, Anna; Bhugra, Dinesh; Smith, Alexander (February 2023). "Generating scholarly content with ChatGPT: ethical challenges for medical publishing". The Lancet Digital Health. 5 (3): e105-e106. doi:10.1016/s2589-7500(23)00019-5. ISSN 2589-7500. PMID 36754725. S2CID 256655912.

Wolfram, Stephen (February 14, 2023). "What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?".

Wolfram, Stephen (March 23, 2023). "ChatGPT Gets Its "Wolfram Superpowers"!".

Bartholomew, Jem; Mehta, Dhrumil. "How the media is covering ChatGPT". Columbia Journalism Review.

Zhao, Wayne Xin; et al. (2023). "A Survey of Large Language Models". arXiv: [cs.CL].

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ChatGPT ( Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a large language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022, that enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. Successive prompts and replies, known as prompt engineering, are considered at each conversation stage as a context.