December's History

DECEMBER HISTORY:

1st December:
1913 – The Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.
1981 – The AIDS virus is officially recognized.

2nd December:
1409 – The University of Leipzig opens.
1983 – Michael Jackson's Thriller music video is released.

3rd December:
1818 – Illinois becomes the 21st U.S. state.
1979 – Shadow Traffic begins broadcasting in the New York City metropolitan area.
2005 – XCOR Aerospace makes first manned rocket aircraft delivery of US Mail in Mojave, California.

4th December:
1110 – First Crusade: The Crusaders conquer Sidon.
1909 – 1st Grey Cup game was played. The University of Toronto Varsity Blues defeat the Toronto Parkdale Canoe Club 26–6.

5th December:
1492 – Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to set foot on the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
1746 – Revolt in Genoa against Spanish rule.

6th December:
1884 – The Washington Monument in Washington D.C. is completed.
1965 – Pakistan's Islamic Ideology Advisory Committee recommends that Islamic Studies be made a compulsory subject for Muslim students from primary to graduate level.

7th December:
1972 – Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew takes the photograph known as The Blue Marble as they leave the Earth.
1975 – Indonesia invades East Timor.

8th December:
1987 – The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is signed.
1993 – The North American Free Trade Agreement is signed into law by US President Bill Clinton.

9th December:
1425 – The Catholic University of Leuven is founded.
1872 – In Louisiana, P. B. S. Pinchback becomes the first serving African-American governor of a U.S. state.
1872 – In Louisiana, P. B. S. Pinchback becomes the first serving African-American governor of a U.S. state.

10th December:
1817 – Mississippi becomes the 20th U.S. state.
1901 – The first Nobel Prizes are awarded.
1955 – The Mighty Mouse Playhouse premieres on television.

11th December:
1816 – Indiana becomes the 19th U.S. state.
1997 – The Kyoto Protocol opens for signature.

12th December:
1963 – Kenya gains its independence from the United Kingdom.
1979 – Rhodesia changes its name to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia.

13th December:
1938 – The Holocaust: The Neuengamme concentration camp opens in the Bergedorf district of Hamburg, Germany.
1949 – The Knesset votes to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem.

14th December:
1836 – The Toledo War unofficially ends.
1009 – Birthday of Emperor Go-Suzaku of Japan (d. 1045).

15th December:
1868 – Shogunate rebels found Ezo Republic in Hokkaidō.
1914 – A gas explosion at Mitsubishi Hojyo coal mine, Kyūshū, Japan, kills 687. This accident is the worst coal mine disaster in Japanese history.
1954 –Birthday of Mark Warner, American politician.

16th December:
1938 – Adolf Hitler institutes the Cross of Honor of the German Mother.
1971 – Independence Day of the State of Bahrain from British Protectorate Status.
1991 – Independence of The Republic of Kazakhstan.

17th December:
1935 – First flight of the Douglas DC-3 airplane.
1947 – First flight of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet strategic bomber.
1967 – Prime Minister of Australia Harold Holt disappears while swimming near Portsea, Victoria and was presumed drowned.

18th December:
1878 – Al-Thani Familiy became the rulers of the state of Qatar.
1915 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson marries Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.
1956 – Japan joins the United Nations.

19th December:
324 – Licinius abdicates his position as Roman Emperor.
1835 – The first issue of The Blade newspaper is published in Toledo, Ohio.
1924 – The last Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is sold in London, England.
2001 – Argentine economic crisis: December 2001 riots – Riots erupt in Buenos Aires.

20th December:
1835 – First signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence at Goliad, Texas.
1917 – Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, is founded.
1942 – World War II: Bombing of Calcutta by the Japanese.
1995 – NATO begins peacekeeping in Bosnia.

21st December:
1937 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film ever, premieres at the Carthay Circle Theater.
1962 – Rondane National Park is established as Norway's first national park.

22nd December:
1885 – Ito Hirobumi, a samurai, became the first Prime Minister of Japan.
1937 – The Lincoln Tunnel opens to traffic in New York City.
1989 – After a week of bloody demonstrations, Ion Iliescu takes over as president of Romania, ending Nicolae Ceauşescu's Communist dictatorship.

23rd December:
1893 – The opera Hänsel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck is first performed.
1937 – First flight of the Vickers Wellington bomber.
1979 – Soviet war in Afghanistan: Soviet forces occupy Kabul, the Afghan capital.
2004 – Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean is hit by an 8.1 magnitude earthquake.

24th December:
1914 – World War I: The "Christmas truce" begins.
1946 – France's Fourth Republic is founded.
1979 – The first European Ariane rocket is launched.

25th December:
1599 – The city of Natal, Brazil is founded.
1620 – Elizabeth Báthory's crimes were uncovered.

26th December:
1805 – Austria and France sign the Treaty of Pressburg.
1933 – The Nissan Motor Company is organized in Tokyo, Japan.
1996 – Start of the largest strike in South Korean history.

27th December:
537 – The Hagia Sophia is completed.
1836 – The worst ever avalanche in England occurs at Lewes, Sussex, killing 8 people.

28th Decmeber:
1308 – The reign of Emperor Hanazono, emperor of Japan, begins.
1832 – John C. Calhoun becomes the first Vice President of the United States to resign.
1950 – The Peak District becomes the United Kingdom's first National Park.

29th December:
1845 – Texas is admitted as the 28th U.S. state.
1930 – Sir Muhammad Iqbal's presidential address in Allahabad introduces the Two-Nation Theory and outlines a vision for the creation of Pakistan.
1939 – First flight of the Consolidated B-24.

30th December:
1906 – The All India Muslim League is founded in Dacca, East Bengal, British India Empire, which later laid down the foundations of Pakistan.
1919 – Lincoln's Inn in London admits its first female bar student.

31st December:
406 – Vandals, Alans and Suebians cross the Rhine, beginning an invasion of Gaul.
1599 – The British East India Company is chartered.
1831 – Gramercy Park is deeded to New York City.
1923 – The chimes of Big Ben are broadcast on radio for the first time by the BBC.
1944 – World War II: Hungary declares war on Nazi Germany.
1983 – The AT&T Bell System is broken up by the United States Government.
2007 – The massive Big Dig construction project in Boston, Massachusetts ends.

2012 (The Phenomena)

A date inscription for the Mayan Long Count

The 2012 phenomenon comprises a range of eschatological beliefs and proposals, which posit that cataclysmic or transformative events will occur on or around December 21 in the year 2012,which is said to be the end-date of a 5,125-year-long Mayan Long Count calendar. These beliefs may derive in part from archaeoastronomical speculation,alternative interpretations of mythology, numerological constructions, or alleged prophecies from extraterrestrial beings.

A New Age interpretation of this transition posits that, during this time, the planet and its inhabitants may undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation, and that 2012 may mark the beginning of a new era. Conversely, some believe that the 2012 date marks the beginning of an apocalypse. Both ideas have been disseminated in numerous books and TV documentaries, and have spread around the world through websites and discussion groups.

Scholars of various stripes have disputed the idea that a catastrophe will happen in 2012, suggesting that predictions of impending doom are found neither in classic Maya accounts nor in contemporary science. Mainstream Mayanist scholars argue that the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Maya history.To the modern Maya, 2012 is largely irrelevant, and classic Maya sources on the subject are scarce and contradictory, suggesting that there was little if any universal agreement among them about what, if anything, the date might mean.
Meanwhile, astronomers and other natural scientists have rejected the apocalyptic forecasts, on the grounds that the anticipated events are precluded by astronomical observations, or are unsubstantiated by the predictions that have been generated from these findings.
NASA likens fears about 2012 to those about the Y2K bug in the late 1990s, suggesting that an adequate analysis should stem fears of disaster.

Galactic alignment

In the mid-1990s, John Major Jenkins asserted that the ancient Maya had planned an intentional correspondence of a December 21 date with the winter solstice in 2012. This date was in line with an idea he terms the galactic alignment.

In the solar system, the planets and the Sun share roughly the same plane of orbit, known as the plane of the ecliptic. From our perspective on Earth, the Zodiacal constellations move along or near the ecliptic, and over time, appear to recede counterclockwise by one degree every 72 years. This movement is attributed to a slight wobble in the Earth's axis as it spins.As a result, approximately every 2160 years, the constellation visible on the early morning of the spring equinox changes. In Western astrological traditions, this signals the end of one astrological age (currently the Age of Pisces) and the beginning of another (Age of Aquarius). Over the course of 26,000 years, the precession of the equinoxes makes one full circuit around the ecliptic.

Just as the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere is currently in the constellation of Pisces, so the winter solstice is currently in the constellation of Sagittarius, which happens to be the constellation intersected by the galactic equator.Every year for the last 1000 years or so, on the winter solstice, the Earth, Sun and the galactic equator come into alignment, and every year, precession pushes the Sun's position a little way further through the Milky Way's band.

Jenkins suggests that the Maya based their calendar on observations of the Great Rift, a band of dark dust clouds in the Milky Way, which the Maya called the Xibalba be or "Black Road.Jenkins claims that the Maya were aware of where the ecliptic intersected the Black Road and gave this position in the sky a special significance in their cosmology.According to the hypothesis, the Sun precisely aligns with this intersection point at the winter solstice of 2012.



The Milky Way near Cygnus showing the lane of the Dark Rift, which the Maya called the Xibalba be or "Black Road"


Jenkins claimed that the classical Mayans anticipated this conjunction and celebrated it as the harbinger of a profound spiritual transition for mankind.New Age proponents of the galactic alignment hypothesis argue that, just as astrology uses the positions of stars and planets to make claims of future events, the Mayans plotted their calendars with the objective of preparing for significant world events.enkins attributes the insights of ancient Maya shamans about the galactic center to their use of psilocybin mushrooms, psychoactive toads, and other psychedelics.Jenkins also associates the Xibalba be with a "world tree", drawing on studies of contemporary (not ancient) Maya cosmology.

The alignment in question is not exclusive to 2012 but takes place over a 36-year period, corresponding to the diameter of the Sun, with the most precise convergence having already occurred in 1998.Also, Jenkins himself notes that there is no concrete evidence that the Maya were aware of precession.While some Mayan scholars, such as Barbara MacLeod, have suggested that some Mayan holy dates were timed to precessional cycles, scholarly opinion on the subject is divided.There is also little evidence, archaeological or historical, that the Maya placed any importance on solstices or equinoxes.

The alignment of Black hole:

An apocalyptic reading of Jenkins's hypothesis has that, when the galactic alignment occurs, it will somehow create a combined gravitational effect between the Sun and the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (known as Sgr A*), creating havoc on Earth.Apart from the fact noted above that the "galactic alignment" predicted by Jenkins already happened in 1998, the Sun's apparent path through the zodiac as seen from Earth does not take it near the true galactic center, but rather several degrees above it.Even if this were not the case, Sgr A* is 30,000 light years from Earth, and would have to be more than 6 million times closer to cause any gravitational disruption to our Solar System.
Some versions of this idea associate the theory of a 2012 "galactic alignment" with that of a very different "galactic alignment" proposed by some scientists to explain a supposed periodicity in mass extinctions in the fossil record.The hypothesis supposes that vertical oscillations made by the Sun as it orbits the galactic center cause it to regularly pass through the galactic plane. When the Sun's orbit takes it outside the galactic disc, the influence of the galactic tide is weaker; as it re-enters the galactic disc, as it does every 20–25 million years, it comes under the influence of the far stronger "disc tides", which, according to mathematical models, increase the flux of Oort cloud comets into the Solar System by a factor of 4, leading to a massive increase in the likelihood of a devastating comet impact.However, this "alignment" takes place over tens of millions of years, and could never be timed to an exact date.Evidence shows that the Sun passed through the galactic disc only three million years ago, and is now moving farther above it.

2012 (About the Film):

A movie called 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring the actors John Cusack, Danny Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt and Woody Harrelson was released on November 13, 2009. On November 12, 2008, the studio released the first teaser trailer for 2012 that showed a megatsunami surging over the Himalayas and interlaced a purportedly scientific message suggesting that the world would end in 2012, and that the world's governments were not preparing its population for the event. The trailer ended with a message to viewers to "find out the truth" by searching "2012" on search engines. The Guardian criticized the marketing effectiveness as "deeply flawed" and associated it with "websites that make even more spurious claims about 2012".

The studio also launched a viral marketing website operated by the fictional Institute for Human Continuity, where filmgoers could register for a lottery number to be part of a small population that would be rescued from the global destruction.The fictitious website lists the Nibiru collision, a galactic alignment, and increased solar activity among its possible doomsday scenarios. David Morrison of NASA has received over 1000 inquiries from people who thought the website was genuine and has condemned it, saying "I've even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don't want to see the world end. I think when you lie on the Internet and scare children in order to make a buck, that is ethically wrong."

Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE)

Karachi Stock Exchange:

The Karachi Stock Exchange or KSE is a stock exchange located in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan. Founded in 1947, it is Pakistan's largest and oldest stock exchange, with many Pakistani as well as overseas listings. Its current premises are situated on Stock Exchange Road, in the heart of Karachi's Business District.

History:
Karachi Stock Exchange is the biggest and most liquid exchange in Pakistan. It was declared the “Best Performing Stock Market of the World for the year 2002”. As of Sept25, 2009, 654 companies were listed with a market capitalization of Rs. 2.806 trillion (US$ 33.81 billion) having listed capital of Rs. 705.873 billion (US$ 10.615 billion). The KSE 100TM Index closed at 9359 on Sept 29, 2009.

Growth:

The KSE is the biggest and most liquid exchange in Pakistan and in 2002 it was declared as the “Best Performing Stock Market of the World” by Business Week. As of December 20, 2007, 671 companies were listed with the market capitalization of Rs. 4364.312 billion (US$ 73 Billion) having listed capital of Rs. 717.3 billion (US$ 12 billion). On December 26, 2007, the KSE 100 Index reached its highest value ever and closed at 14,814.85 points.

Foreign buying interest had been very active on the KSE in 2006 and continued in 2007. According to estimates from the State Bank of Pakistan, foreign investment in capital markets total about US$523 Million. According to a research analyst in Pakistan, around 20pc of the total free float in KSE-30 Index is held by foreign participants.

KSE has seen some fluctuations since the start of 2008. One reason could be that it is the election year in Pakistan, and stocks are expected to remain dull. KSE has set an all time high of 15,000 points, before settling around the 14,000 mark.

Karachi stock exchange Board of Directors has recently (2007) announced plans to construct a 40 story high rise KSE building, as a new direction for future investment.

Disputes between investors and members of the Exchange are resolved through deliberations of the Arbitration Committee of the Exchange.

KSE began with a 50 shares index. As the market grew a representative index was needed. On November 1, 91 the KSE-100 was introduced and remains to this day the most generally accepted measure of the Exchange. Karachi Stock Exchange 100 Index (KSE-100 Index) is a benchmark used to compare prices overtime, companies with the highest market capitalization are selected. To ensure full market representation, the company with the highest market capitalization from each sector is also included.

In 1995 the need was felt for an all share index to reconfirm the KSE-100 and also to provide the basis of index trading in future. On August the 29th, 1995 the KSE all share index was constructed and introduced on September 18, 1995.

FIFA Football World Cup

FIFA World Cup

The current FIFA World Cup Trophy, awarded to the World Cup champions since 1974

The FIFA World Cup, occasionally called the Football World Cup, but usually referred to simply as the World Cup, is an international football competition contested by the men's national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the first tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946, because of World War II.

The current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month – this phase is often called the World Cup Finals. A qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify for the tournament together with the host nation(s). The World Cup is the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world, with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the 2006 final.^[1]

Of the 18 tournaments held, seven nations have won the title. Brazil are the only team that have played in every tournament and have won the World Cup a record five times. Italy are the current champions and have won four titles, and Germany are next with three. The other former champions are Uruguay, winners of the inaugural tournament, and Argentina, with two titles each, and England and France, with one title each.

The most recent World Cup was held in Germany in 2006. The next World Cup will be held in South Africa, between 11 June and 11 July 2010, and the 2014 World Cup will be held in Brazil.

History of previous competitions:

The world's first international football match was a challenge match played in Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England, with the first international tournament, the inaugural edition of the British Home Championship, taking place in 1884. At this stage the sport was rarely played outside the United Kingdom. As football began to increase in popularity in other parts of the world at the turn of the century, it was held as a demonstration sport with no medals awarded at the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics (however, the IOC has retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and at the 1906 Intercalated Games.

After FIFA was founded in 1904, there was an attempt made by FIFA to arrange an international football tournament between nations outside of the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international football, and the official history of FIFA describes the competition as having been a failure.

At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, football became an official competition. Planned by The Football Association (FA), England's football governing body, the event was for amateur players only and was regarded suspiciously as a show rather than a competition. Great Britain (represented by the England national amateur football team) won the gold medals. They repeated the feat in 1912 in Stockholm, where the tournament was organized by the Swedish Football Association.

With the Olympic event continuing to be contested only between amateur teams, Sir Thomas Lipton organized the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy tournament in Turin in 1909. The Lipton tournament was a championship between individual clubs (not national teams) from different nations, each one of which represented an entire nation. The competition is sometimes described as The First World Cup, and featured the most prestigious professional club sides from Italy, Germany and Switzerland, but the FA of England refused to be associated with the competition and declined the offer to send a professional team. Lipton invited West Auckland, an amateur side from County Durham, to represent England instead. West Auckland won the tournament and returned in 1911 to successfully defend their title, and were given the trophy to keep forever, as per the rules of the competition.

In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise the Olympic tournament as a "world football championship for amateurs", and took responsibility for managing the event. This paved the way for the world's first intercontinental football competition, at the 1920 Summer Olympics, contested by Egypt and thirteen European teams, and won by Belgium. Uruguay won the next two Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928.

About The Golden Trophy:

The FIFA World Cup Trophy on a German stamp.

From 1930 to 1970, the Jules Rimet Trophy was awarded to the World Cup winner. It was originally simply known as the World Cup or Coupe du Monde, but in 1946 it was renamed after the FIFA president Jules Rimet who set up the first tournament. In 1970, Brazil's third victory in the tournament entitled them to keep the trophy permanently. However, the trophy was stolen in 1983, and has never been recovered, apparently melted down by the thieves.

After 1970, a new trophy, known as the FIFA World Cup Trophy, was designed. The experts of FIFA, coming from seven different countries, evaluated the 53 presented models, finally opting for the work of the Italian designer Silvio Gazzaniga. The new trophy is 36 cm (14.2 in) high, made of solid 18 carat (75%) gold and weighs 6.175 kg (13.6 lb). The base contains two layers of semi-precious malachite while the bottom side of the trophy bears the engraved year and name of each FIFA World Cup winner since 1974. The description of the trophy by Gazzaniga was: "The lines spring out from the base, rising in spirals, stretching out to receive the world. From the remarkable dynamic tensions of the compact body of the sculpture rise the figures of two athletes at the stirring moment of victory."

This new trophy is not awarded to the winning nation permanently. World Cup winners retain the trophy until the next tournament and are awarded a gold-plated replica rather than the solid gold original.

Records:

Two players share the record for playing in the most World Cups; Mexico's Antonio Carbajal and Germany's Lothar Matthäus both played in five tournaments. Matthäus has played the most World Cup matches overall, with 25 appearances. Brazil's Pelé is the only player to have won three World Cup winners' medals, with 20 other players who have won two World Cup medals.

The overall leading goalscorer in World Cups is Brazil's Ronaldo, scorer of 15 goals in three tournaments. West Germany's Gerd Müller is second, with 14 goals in two tournaments. The third placed goalscorer, France's Just Fontaine, holds the record for the most goals scored in a single World Cup. All his 13 goals were scored in the 1958 tournament. Brazil are the leading scorers in the World Cup having scored 201 goals in 92 games, whilst Germany are the second highest with 190 goals in 93 games.

Brazil's Mário Zagallo and West Germany's Franz Beckenbauer are the only people to date to win the World Cup as both player and head coach. Zagallo won in 1958 and 1962 as a player and in 1970 as head coach. Beckenbauer won in 1974 as captain and in 1990 as head coach. Italy's Vittorio Pozzo is the only head coach to ever win two World Cups.^[57] All World Cup winning head coaches were natives of the country they coached to victory.

Web Frameworks

Web application frameworks:

A web application framework is a software framework that is designed to support the development of dynamic websites, Web applications and Web services. The framework aims to alleviate the overhead associated with common activities performed in Web development. For example, many frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating frameworks and session management, and often promote code reuse.

History of Software Framework:

As the design of the World Wide Web was not inherently dynamic, early hypertext consisted of hand-coded HTML that was published on web servers. Any modifications to published pages needed to be performed by the pages' author. To provide a dynamic web page that reflected user inputs, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard was introduced for interfacing external applications with web servers.^[1] CGI could adversely affect server load, though, since each request had to start a separate process.

Programmers wanted tighter integration with the web server to enable high traffic web applications. The Apache HTTP Server, for example, supports modules that can extend the web server with arbitrary code executions (such as mod perl) or forward specific requests to a web server that can handle dynamic content (such as mod jk). Some web servers (such as Apache Tomcat) were specifically designed to handle dynamic content by executing code written in some languages, such as Java.

Around the same time, new languages were being developed specifically for use in the web, such as ColdFusion, PHP and Active Server Pages.

While the vast majority of languages available to programmers to use in creating dynamic web pages have libraries to help with common tasks, web applications often require specific libraries that are useful in web applications, such as creating HTML (for example, JavaServer Faces).

Eventually, mature, "full stack" frameworks appeared, that often gathered multiple libraries useful for web development into a single cohesive software stack for web developers to use. Examples of this include JavaEE (Servlets), WebObjects, OpenACS, Ruby on Rails, and Zend Framework.

Telephone:

The telephone (from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, "far" and φωνή, phōnē, "voice") is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sound, most commonly the human voice. It is one of the most common household appliances in the developed world, and has long been considered indispensable to business, industry and government. The word "telephone" has been adapted to many languages and is widely recognized around the world.

The device operates principally by converting sound waves into electrical signals, and electrical signals into sound waves. Such signals when conveyed through telephone networks — and often converted to electronic and/or optical signals — enable nearly every telephone user to communicate with nearly every other worldwide. Graphic symbols used to designate telephone service or phone-related information in print, signage, and other media.

History of the Telephone:

Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time-to-time. As with other great inventions such as radio, television, light bulb, and computer, there were several inventors who did pioneering experimental work on voice transmission over a wire and improved on each other's ideas. Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison, among others, have all been credited with pioneering work on the telephone. An undisputed fact is that Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in March 1876.
That first patent by Bell was the master patent of the telephone, from which all other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed.

The early history of the telephone became and still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge mass of lawsuits that hoped to resolve the patent claims of many individuals and commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison patents, however, were forensically victorious and commercially decisive.

A Hungarian engineer, Tivadar Puskás quickly invented the telephone switchboard in 1876, which allowed for the formation of telephone exchanges, and eventually networks.

Basic principles of the invention:

A traditional landline telephone system, also known as "plain old telephone service" (POTS), commonly handles both signaling and audio information on the same twisted pair of insulated wires: the telephone line. Although originally designed for voice communication, the system has been adapted for data communication such as Telex, Fax and Internet communication. The signaling equipment consists of a bell, beeper, light or other device to alert the user to incoming calls, and number buttons or a rotary dial to enter a telephone number for outgoing calls. A twisted pair line is preferred as it is more effective at rejecting electromagnetic interference (EMI) and crosstalk than an untwisted pair.

The telephone consists of an alerting device, usually a ringer, that remains connected to the phone line whenever the phone is "on hook", and other components which are connected when the phone is "off hook". These include a transmitter (microphone), a receiver (speaker) and other circuits for dialing, filtering, and amplification. A calling party wishing to speak to another party will pick up the telephone's handset, thus operating a button switch or "switchhook", which puts the telephone into an active (off hook) state by connecting the transmitter (microphone), receiver (speaker) and related audio components to the line. This circuitry has a low resistance (less than 300 Ohms) which causes DC current (48 volts, nominal) from the telephone exchange to flow through the line. The exchange detects this DC current, attaches a digit receiver circuit to the line, and sends a dial tone to indicate readiness. On a modern telephone, the calling party then presses the number buttons in a sequence corresponding to the telephone number of the called party. The buttons are connected to a tone generator circuit that produces DTMF tones which end up at a circuit at the exchange. A rotary dial telephone employs pulse dialing, sending electrical pulses corresponding to the telephone number to the exchange. (Most exchanges are still equipped to handle pulse dialing.) Provided the called party's line is not already active or "busy", the exchange sends an intermittent ringing signal (about 90 volts AC in North America and UK and 60 volts in Germany) to alert the called party to an incoming call. If the called party's line is active, the exchange sends a busy signal to the calling party. However, if the called party's line is active but has call waiting installed, the exchange sends an intermittent audible tone to the called party to indicate an incoming call.

The phone's ringer is connected to the line through a capacitor, a device which blocks the flow of DC current but permits AC current. This constitutes a mechanism whereby the phone draws no current when it is on hook, but exchange circuitry can send an AC voltage down the line to activate the ringer for an incoming call. When a landline phone is inactive or "on hook", the circuitry at the telephone exchange detects the absence of DC current flow and therefore "knows" that the phone is on hook with only the alerting device electrically connected to the line. When a party initiates a call to this line, and the ringing signal is transmitted. When the called party picks up the handset, they actuate a double-circuit switchhook which simultaneously disconnects the alerting device and connects the audio circuitry to the line. This, in turn, draws DC current through the line, confirming that the called phone is now active. The exchange circuitry turns off the ring signal, and both phones are now active and connected through the exchange. The parties may now converse as long as both phones remain off hook. When a party "hangs up", placing the handset back on the cradle or hook, DC current ceases to flow in that line, signaling the exchange to disconnect the call.

Calls to parties beyond the local exchange are carried over "trunk" lines which establish connections between exchanges. In modern telephone networks, fiber-optic cable and digital technology are often employed in such connections. Satellite technology may be used for communication over very long distances.

In most telephones, the transmitter and receiver (microphone and speaker) are located in the handset, although in a speakerphone these components may be located in the base or in a separate enclosure. Powered by the line, the transmitter produces an electric current whose voltage varies in response to the sound waves arriving at its diaphragm. The resulting current is transmitted along the telephone line to the local exchange then on to the other phone (via the local exchange or a larger network), where it passes through the coil of the receiver. The varying voltage in the coil produces a corresponding movement of the receiver's diaphragm, reproducing the sound waves present at the transmitter.

A Lineman's handset is a telephone designed for testing the telephone network, and may be attached directly to aerial lines and other infrastructure components.

A U.S. candlestick telephone in use, circa
1915.

IP telephony

Hardware-based IP phone.

Internet Protocol (IP) telephony (also known as Voice over Internet Protocol, VoIP), is a disruptive technology that is rapidly gaining ground against traditional telephone network technologies. As of January 2005, up to 10% of telephone subscribers in Japan and South Korea have switched to this digital telephone service. A January 2005 Newsweek article suggested that Internet telephony may be "the next big thing." As of 2006 many VoIP companies offer service to consumers and businesses.

IP telephony uses an Internet connection and hardware IP Phones or softphones installed on personal computers to transmit conversations encoded as data packets. In addition to replacing POTS (plain old telephone service), IP telephony services are also competing with mobile phone services by offering free or lower cost connections via WiFi hotspots. VoIP is also used on private networks which may or may not have a connection to the global telephone network.

IP telephones have two notable disadvantages compared to traditional telephones. Unless the IP telephone's components are backed up with an uninterruptible power supply or other emergency power source, the phone will cease to function during a power outage as can occur during an emergency or disaster, exactly when the phone is most needed. Traditional phones connected to the older PSTN network do not experience that problem since they are powered by the telephone company's battery supply, which will continue to function even if there's a prolonged power black-out. A second distinct problem for an IP phone is the lack of a 'fixed address' which can impact the provision of emergency services such as police, fire or ambulance, should someone call for them. Unless the registered user updates the IP phone's physical address location after moving to a new residence, emergency services can be, and have been, dispatched to the wrong location.

Steel guitar (A type of a guitar)

Steel guitar:

Steel guitar is a type of guitar and/or the method of playing the instrument. The name steel guitar comes not from the material of which the guitar is made, but from the name of the steel, a slide held in the left hand.

Steel guitar can describe:
A method of playing slide guitar using a steel. Resonator guitars, including round necked varieties, are particularly suitable for this style, but other types are also used, usually with modified high actions, as well as instruments produced specifically for the purpose.
A specialised instrument built for playing in steel guitar fashion. These are of several types:

Lap steel guitar, which may be:

Lap slide guitar, with a conventional wooden guitar box.
The square-necked variety of resonator guitar.
Electric lap steel guitar.
Electric console steel guitar.
Electric pedal steel guitar.

Technique of the Steel Guitar:

Steel guitar refers to a method of playing on a guitar held horizontally, with the strings uppermost and the bass strings towards the player, and using a type of slide called a steel above the fingerboard rather than fretting the strings with the fingers. This may be done with any guitar, but is most common on instruments designed and produced for this style of it.

The technique was invented and popularized in Hawaii. Thus, the lap steel guitar is sometimes known as the Hawaiian guitar, particularly in documents from the early 1900s, and today any steel guitar is frequently called a Hawaiian steel guitar. However, in Hawaiian music, Hawaiian guitar means slack string guitar, played in the conventional or Spanish position.

Bottleneck guitar may have actually developed from Steel guitar technique. It is similar, with the exception that the guitar is held in the conventional position, and using a different form of slide to accommodate this playing position.

Instruments:

A Steel Guitar is one designed to be played in steel guitar fashion.

Historically, these have been of many types, but two dominate:

Resonator guitars, particularly the square-necked variety which can only be played in steel guitar fashion.

Electric instruments, starting with electric lap steel guitars and developing through the console steel guitar to the pedal steel guitar.

Lap steel guitar:

The lap steel typically has 6 strings and is tuned to either standard guitar tuning, or an open chord. It differs from a conventional or Spanish guitar in having a higher action and often a neck that is square in cross section. The frets, unused in steel style playing, may be replaced by markers.
There are three main types:
Lap slide guitars, which are acoustic instruments but may have electric pickups for amplification in addition.
Resonator guitars, which are also acoustic instruments but may have pickups for amplification in addition.
Electric lap steel guitars, which are normally solid body.

Early lap steel guitars were Spanish guitars modified by raising both the bridge and head nut. The string height at the head nut was raised to about half an inch by using a head nut converter or converter nut. This type of guitar is claimed to have been invented in about 1889 by Joseph Kekuku in Hawaii.
Some lap slide guitars, particularly those of Weissenborn and their imitators, have two 6-string necks, but electric and resonator lap steel guitars are normally single neck instruments.

Square-necked resonator guitars are always played in lap steel fashion, and so are specialised lap steel guitars. Round-necked varieties can be played in lap steel fashion, with some restrictions on the available tunings, but can also be played in Spanish position.

The Rickenbacker frying pan, an electric lap steel guitar produced from 1931 to 1939, was the first commercially successful solid body guitar.

Console steel guitar:

The console steel guitar is an electric instrument, intermediate between the lap steel from which it developed and the pedal steel which in turn developed from the console steel. There are no pedals, so the player has only as many tunings available as there are necks.

The development of the lap steel guitar into the console steel guitar saw the introduction of amplification as standard, multiple necks, and additional strings on each neck, first to seven, and eight strings per neck is now common. One, two, three and four neck instruments are not uncommon. The two neck, eight string per neck configuration is particularly favoured in Hawaiian music.

The distinction between console steel guitar and lap steel guitar is fuzzy at best, and some makers and authorities do not use the term console steel guitar at all, but refer to any steel guitar without pedals as a lap steel guitar even if playing it in lap steel position would be quite impossible.

Pedal steel guitar:

The pedal steel guitar is an electric instrument normally with 10 to 14 strings per neck, and sometimes two or even three necks, each in a different tuning. Up to eight pedals (not counting the volume pedal) and up to eight knee-levers are used to alter the tunings of different strings, which gives the instrument its distinctive voice, most often heard in country music.

The extra strings and use of pedals gives even a single neck pedal steel guitar far more versatility than any table steel guitar, but at the same time makes playing far more complex.

Steels:

The type of slide called a steel which gives the technique its name was probably originally made of steel, or the name may come from the legend that the first steel was a railroad track.

Many materials are used, but nickel-plated brass is popular for the highest-quality slides, which are shaped to fit the hand and as a result have a cross-section not unlike a railroad track. Another traditional and popular variety is a cylindrical shaped steel bar that needs to be balanced between the thumb and the middle finger with the forefinger providing for varying degrees of pressure on the string.

WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY

Wireless Local Area Network (LAN):

A wireless local area network (WLAN) links two or more devices using some wireless distribution method (typically spread-spectrum or OFDM radio), and usually providing a connection through an access point to the wider internet. This gives users the mobility to move around within a local coverage area and still be connected to the network.

Wireless LANs have become popular in the home due to ease of installation, and the increasing popularity of laptop computers. Public businesses such as coffee shops and malls have begun to offer wireless access to their customers; sometimes for free. Large wireless network projects are being put up in many major cities: New York City, for instance, has begun a pilot program to cover all five boroughs of the city with wireless Internet access.

Types of Wireless LAN:

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-Peer or ad-hoc wireless LAN

An ad-hoc network is a network where stations communicate only peer to peer (P2P). There is no base and no one gives permission to talk. This is accomplished using the Independent Basic Service Set (IBSS).

A peer-to-peer (P2P) network allows wireless devices to directly communicate with each other. Wireless devices within range of each other can discover and communicate directly without involving central access points. This method is typically used by two computers so that they can connect to each other to form a network.

If a signal strength meter is used in this situation, it may not read the strength accurately and can be misleading, because it registers the strength of the strongest signal, which may be the closest computer.

Hidden node problem: Devices A and C are both communicating with B, but are unaware of each other

IEEE 802.11 define the physical layer (PHY) and MAC (Media Access Control) layers based on CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance). The 802.11 specification includes provisions designed to minimize collisions, because two mobile units may both be in range of a common access point, but out of range of each other.

The 802.11 has two basic modes of operation: Ad hoc mode enables peer-to-peer transmission between mobile units. Infrastructure mode in which mobile units communicate through an access point that serves as a bridge to a wired network infrastructure is the more common wireless LAN application the one being covered. Since wireless communication uses a more open medium for communication in comparison to wired LANs, the 802.11 designers also included shared-key encryption mechanisms: Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA, WPA2), to secure wireless computer networks.

Bridge System:

A bridge can be used to connect networks, typically of different types. A wireless Ethernet bridge allows the connection of devices on a wired Ethernet network to a wireless network. The bridge acts as the connection point to the Wireless LAN.

Wireless distribution system (WDB):

A Wireless Distribution System is a system that enables the wireless interconnection of access points in an IEEE 802.11 network. It allows a wireless network to be expanded using multiple access points without the need for a wired backbone to link them, as is traditionally required. The notable advantage of WDS over other solutions is that it preserves the MAC addresses of client packets across links between access points.

An access point can be either a main, relay or remote base station. A main base station is typically connected to the wired Ethernet. A relay base station relays data between remote base stations, wireless clients or other relay stations to either a main or another relay base station. A remote base station accepts connections from wireless clients and passes them to relay or main stations. Connections between "clients" are made using MAC addresses rather than by specifying IP assignments.

All base stations in a Wireless Distribution System must be configured to use the same radio channel, and share WEP keys or WPA keys if they are used. They can be configured to different service set identifiers. WDS also requires that every base station be configured to forward to others in the system.

WDS may also be referred to as repeater mode because it appears to bridge and accept wireless clients at the same time (unlike traditional bridging). It should be noted, however, that throughput in this method is halved for all clients connected wirelessly.

When it is difficult to connect all of the access points in a network by wires, it is also possible to put up access points as repeaters.

November's History

November's History:

1st November:
1179 – Philip II is crowned King of France.
1604 – William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello is presented for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.
1876 – New Zealand's provincial government system is dissolved.
1961 – 50,000 women in 60 cities participate in the inaugural Women Strike for Peace (WSP) against nuclear proliferation.

2nd November:
1889 – North and South Dakota are admitted as the 39th and 40th U.S. states.
1964 – King Saud of Saudi Arabia is deposed by a family coup, and replaced by his half-brother King Faisal.
1988 – The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream media attention, is launched from MIT.

3rd November:
1493 – Christopher Columbus first sights the island of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea.
1812 – Napoleon's armies are defeated at Vyazma.
1911 – Chevrolet officially enters the automobile market in competition with the Ford Model T.

4th November:
1429 – Joan of Arc liberated Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier.
1861 – The University of Washington opens in Seattle, Washington as the Territorial University.
1970 – Genie, a 13-year-old feral child is found in Los Angeles, California having been locked in her bedroom for most of her life.
5th November:
1780 – French-American forces under Colonel LaBalme are defeated by Miami Chief Little Turtle.
1872 – Women's suffrage: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.
2007 – China's first lunar satellite, Chang'e 1 goes into orbit around the Moon.
6th November:
1856 – The first work of fiction by the author later known as George Eliot is submitted for publication.
1913 – Mohandas Gandhi is arrested while leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa.
1947 – Meet The Press makes its television debut (the show went to a weekly schedule on September 12, 1948).
7th November:
1665 – The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, is first published.
1893 – Women in the U.S. state of Colorado are granted the right to vote.

8th November:
1889 – Montana is admitted as the 41st U.S. state.
1976 – A series of earthquakes spreads panic in the city of Thessaloniki, which is evacuated.

9th November:
1492 – Peace of Etaples between Henry VII and Charles VIII.
1729 – Spain, France and Great Britain sign the Treaty of Seville.
1945 – Soo Bahk Do Moo Duk Kwan is founded.

10th November:
1938 – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, dies.
1997 – WorldCom and MCI Communications announce a $37 billion merger (the largest merger in US history at the time).

11th November:
1889 – Washington is admitted as the 42nd U.S. state.
1918 – Emperor Charles I of Austria relinquishes power.
2008 – The RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2) set sail on her final voyage to Dubai.

12th November:
1847 – Sir James Young Simpson, a British physician, is the first to use chloroform as an anaesthetic.
1936 – In California, the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge opens to traffic.
1996 – A Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 and a Kazakh Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane collide in mid-air near New Delhi, killing 349. The deadliest mid-air collision to date.

13th November:
1971 – The American space probe, Mariner 9, becomes the first spacecraft to orbit another planet successfully, swinging into its planned trajectory around Mars.
2002 – The oil tanker Prestige sinks off the Galician coast and causes a huge oil spill.
14th November:
1922 – The BBC begins radio service in the United Kingdom.
2002 – Argentina defaults on an $805 million World Bank payment.

15th November:
1854 – In Egypt, the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, is given the necessary royal concession.
1971 – Intel releases world's first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004.
1990 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Atlantis launches with flight STS-38.

16th November:
1973 – Skylab program: NASA launches Skylab 4 with a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral, Florida for an 84-day mission.
2000 – Bill Clinton becomes the first U.S. President to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.
.
17th November:
1800 – The United States Congress holds its first session in Washington, D.C.
1905 – The Eulsa Treaty is signed between Japan and Korea.
2005 – Italy's national anthem, Il Canto degli Italiani, becomes official for the first time, almost 60 years after it is provisionally chosen following the birth of the republic.

18th November:
1493 – Christopher Columbus first sights what is now Puerto Rico.
1905 – Prince Carl of Denmark becomes King Haakon VII of Norway.
1918 – Latvia declares its independence from Russia.
1963 – The first push-button telephone goes into service.

19th November:
1816 – Warsaw University is established.
1946 – Afghanistan, Iceland and Sweden join the United Nations.
1955 – National Review publishes its first issue.

20th November:
1789 – New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
1984 – The SETI Institute is founded.
1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.

21st November:
1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
2004 – The island of Dominica is hit by the most destructive earthquake in its history. The northern half of the island receives the most damage, especially the town of Portsmouth. It is also felt in neighboring Guadeloupe, where one person is killed.

22nd November:
1858 – Denver, Colorado is founded.
1922 – Egyptology: Howard Carter, assisted by Lord Carnarvon, opens the tomb of Tutankhamun.
2008 – YouTube hosts the largest ever live broadcast, YouTube Live.

23rd November:
1936 – The first edition of Life is published.
1963 – The BBC broadcast the first ever episode of Doctor Who starring William Hartnell which would become the world's longest Science-Fiction Drama to date.

24th November:
1429 – Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieged La Charité.
1966 – New York City experiences the smoggiest day in the city's history.

25th November:
1867 – Alfred Nobel patents dynamite.
1952 – Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play The Mousetrap opens at the Ambassadors Theatre in London and eventually becomes the longest continuously-running play in history.
1975 – Suriname gains independence from the Netherlands.

26th November:
1842 – The University of Notre Dame is founded.
1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day in the United States.
1990 – The Delta II rocket makes its maiden flight.

27th November:
1912 – Spain declares a protectorate over the north shore of Morocco.
1924 – In New York City, the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is held.
2005 – The first partial human face transplant is completed in Amiens, France.

28th November:
1785 – The Treaty of Hopewell is signed.
1912 – Albania declares its independence from the Ottoman Empire.
1975 – East Timor declares its independence from Portugal.

29th November:
1922 – Howard Carter opens the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun to the public.
1929 – U.S. Admiral Richard Byrd becomes the first person to fly over the South Pole.
2007 – A 7.4 magnitude earthquake occurs off the northern coast of Martinique. This affected the Eastern Caribbean as far north as Puerto Rico and as south as Trinidad.

30th November:
1936 – In London, the Crystal Palace is destroyed by fire.
1967 – The People's Republic of South Yemen becomes independent from the United Kingdom.

Charles Dickens (Legendary Author)

Charles Dickens:

Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870), pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print. A concern with what he saw as the pressing need for social reform is a theme that runs throughout his work.

Much of his work first appeared in periodicals and magazines in serialised form, a favoured way of publishing fiction at the time. Other writers of the time would complete entire novels before serial publication commenced, but Dickens often wrote his in parts, in the order in which they were meant to appear. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by one cliffhanger after another to keep the public eager for the next instalment. Critics and fellow-novelists such as George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton have applauded Dickens for his mastery of prose, and for his teeming gallery of unique characters, many of whom have acquired iconic status in the English-speaking world. Others such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf have accused him of sentimentality and implausibility.

Early Years of Charles Dickens:

Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, in Landport, Portsmouth, in Hampshire, the second of eight children to John Dickens (1786–1851), a clerk in the Navy Pay Office at Portsmouth, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Barrow, 1789–1863). He was christened at St Mary's Church in Portsea on 4 March 1812. When he was five, the family moved to Chatham, Kent. In 1822, when he was ten, the family relocated to 16 Bayham Street, Camden Town, in London.

Birthplace of Dickens: No. 1 Mile End Terrace, Landport (now 393 Commercial Road, Portsmouth)

His early years seem to have been an idyllic time, although he thought himself then a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, with a particular fondness for the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He talked, later in life, of his extremely poignant memories of childhood, and of his continuing photographic memory of the people and events that helped to bring his fiction to life. His family's early, moderate wealth provided the boy Dickens with some private education at William Giles's School, in Chatham. This time of prosperity came to an abrupt end, however, when his father spent beyond his means in entertaining and in retaining his social position, and was finally imprisoned at Marshalsea debtor's prison. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family joined him in residence at Marshalsea, south of the Thames, (except for Charles, who boarded in Camden Town at the house of family friend Elizabeth Roylance). Sundays became a treat, when with his sister Fanny, allowed out from the Royal Academy of Music, he spent the day at the Marshalsea. The prison provided the setting of one of his works, Little Dorrit, and is where the title character's father is imprisoned.

Just before his father's arrest, 12-year-old Dickens had begun working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on jars of thick shoe polish. This money paid for his lodgings with Mrs. Roylance and helped support his family. Mrs. Roylance, Dickens later wrote, was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family", and whom he eventually immortalized, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in Dombey & Son. Later, lodgings were found for him in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in The Borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman...lame, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame too"; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.^[10] The mostly unregulated, strenuous—and often cruel—work conditions of the factory employees (especially children) made a deep impression on Dickens. His experiences served to influence later fiction and essays, and were the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor.

Writing Career:

Journalism and early novels

In 1833, Dickens was able to get his very first story, A Dinner at Poplar Walk, published in the London periodical, Monthly Magazine. The following year he rented rooms at Furnival's Inn becoming a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain by stagecoach to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches which appeared in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz which was published in 1836 and led to the serialization of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout much of his subsequent literary career. Dickens's keen perceptiveness, intimate knowledge and understanding of the people, and tale-spinning genius were quickly to gain him world renown and wealth.

An 1839 portrait of a young Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise

In 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position that he would hold for three years, when he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip which, when it died in 1841, Dickens had stuffed (it is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia).

On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children:

• Charles Culliford Boz Dickens C. C. B. Dickens, later known as Charles Dickens, Jr, editor for All the Year Round, author of the Dickens's Dictionary of London (1879).
• Mary Dickens
• Kate Macready Dickens
• Walter Landor Dickens
• Francis Jeffrey Dickens
• Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens
• Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens
• Sir Henry Fielding Dickens
• Dora Annie Dickens
• Edward Dickens Emigrated to Australia.

On 25 March 1837, Dickens moved with his family into 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which he had a three year lease at £80 a year) where he would remain until December 1839. A new addition to the household was Dickens's younger brother Frederick. Also, Catherine's 17 year old sister Mary moved with them from Furnival's Inn to offer support to her newly married sister and brother-in-law. It was not unusual for a woman's unwed sister to live with and help a newly married couple. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalized as the death of Little Nell

Death of Charles Dickens:

On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. The next day, on 9 June, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, he died at Gad's Hill Place never having regained consciousness. The great author was mourned by all his readers. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads: "CHARLES DICKENS Born 7th February 1812 Died 9th June 1870." A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, June 9th, 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."

On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens's interment in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."^[41]

Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States.