title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: In the early years of operation, the analog computers would not always keep up with rapidly changing flight environmental inputs. If internal pressures became too great and the spike was incorrectly positioned, the shock wave would suddenly blow out the front of the inlet, called an "inlet unstart". During unstarts, afterburner extinctions were common. The remaining engine's asymmetrical thrust would cause the aircraft to yaw violently to one side. SAS, autopilot, and manual control inputs would fight the yawing, but often the extreme off-angle would reduce airflow in the opposite engine and stimulate "sympathetic stalls". This generated a rapid counter-yawing, often coupled with loud "banging" noises, and a rough ride during which crews' helmets would sometimes strike their cockpit canopies. One response to a single unstart was unstarting both inlets to prevent yawing, then restarting them both. After wind tunnel testing and computer modeling by NASA Dryden test center, Lockheed installed an electronic control to detect unstart conditions and perform this reset action without pilot intervention. During troubleshooting of the unstart issue, NASA also discovered the vortices from the nose chines were entering the engine and interfering with engine efficiency. NASA developed a computer to control the engine bypass doors which countered this issue and improved efficiency. Beginning in 1980, the analog inlet control system was replaced by a digital system, which reduced unstart instances.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71 was powered by two Pratt & Whitney J58 (company designation JT11D-20) axial-flow turbojet engines. The J58 was a considerable innovation of the era, capable of producing a static thrust of . The engine was most efficient around Mach 3.2, the Blackbird's typical cruising speed. At take-off, the afterburner provided 26% of the thrust. This proportion increased progressively with speed until the afterburner provided all the thrust at about Mach 3.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Air was initially compressed (and heated) by the inlet spike and subsequent converging duct between the center body and inlet cowl. The shock waves generated slowed the air to subsonic speeds relative to the engine. The air then entered the engine compressor. Some of this compressor flow (20% at cruise) was removed after the fourth compressor stage and went straight to the afterburner through six bypass tubes. Air passing through the turbojet was compressed further by the remaining five compressor stages and then fuel was added in the combustion chamber. After passing through the turbine, the exhaust, together with the compressor bleed air, entered the afterburner.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: At around Mach 3, the temperature rise from the intake compression, added to the engine compressor temperature rise, reduced the allowable fuel flow because the turbine temperature limit did not change. The rotating machinery produced less power, but still enough to run at 100% RPM, thus keeping the airflow through the intake constant. The rotating machinery had become a drag item and the engine thrust at high speeds came from the afterburner temperature rise. Maximum flight speed was limited by the temperature of the air entering the engine compressor, which was not certified for temperatures above .


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Originally, the Blackbird's J58 engines were started with the assistance of two Buick Wildcat V8 internal combustion engines, externally mounted on a vehicle referred to as an AG330 "start cart". The start cart was positioned underneath the J58 and the two Buick engines powered a single, vertical drive shaft connecting to the J58 engine and spinning it to above 3,200 RPM, at which point the turbojet could self-sustain. Once the first J58 engine was started, the cart was repositioned to start the aircraft's other J58 engine. Later start carts used Chevrolet big-block V8 engines. Eventually, a quieter, pneumatic start system was developed for use at main operating bases. The V8 start carts remained at diversion landing sites not equipped with the pneumatic system.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Several exotic fuels were investigated for the Blackbird. Development began on a coal slurry power plant, but Johnson determined that the coal particles damaged important engine components. Research was conducted on a liquid hydrogen powerplant, but the tanks for storing cryogenic hydrogen were not of a suitable size or shape. In practice, the Blackbird would burn somewhat conventional JP-7, which was difficult to ignite. To start the engines, triethylborane (TEB), which ignites on contact with air, was injected to produce temperatures high enough to ignite the JP-7. The TEB produced a characteristic green flame, which could often be seen during engine ignition.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: On a typical SR-71 mission, the airplane took off with only a partial fuel load to reduce stress on the brakes and tires during takeoff and also ensure it could successfully take off should one engine fail. It is a common misconception that the planes refueled shortly after takeoff because the jet fuel leaked. The leaking of fuel was an intentional design feature because the high heat generated by the aircraft made it impossible to fully seal the fuselage tanks against leaks. However, the amount of fuel that leaked was not enough to make the refueling necessary; the planes refueled because the maximum speeds of the aircraft were only possible with aerial refueling.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71 also required in-flight refueling to replenish fuel during long-duration missions. Supersonic flights generally lasted no more than 90 minutes before the pilot had to find a tanker.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Specialized KC-135Q tankers were required to refuel the SR-71. The KC-135Q had a modified high-speed boom, which would allow refueling of the Blackbird at nearly the tanker's maximum airspeed with minimum flutter. The tanker also had special fuel systems for moving JP-4 (for the KC-135Q itself) and JP-7 (for the SR-71) between different tanks. As an aid to the pilot when refueling, the cockpit was fitted with a peripheral vision horizon display. This unusual instrument projected a barely visible artificial horizon line across the top of the entire instrument panel, which gave the pilot subliminal cues on aircraft attitude.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Nortronics, Northrop Corporation's electronics development division, had developed an astro-inertial guidance system (ANS), which could correct inertial navigation system errors with celestial observations, for the SM-62 Snark missile, and a separate system for the ill-fated AGM-48 Skybolt missile, the latter of which was adapted for the SR-71.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Before takeoff, a primary alignment brought the ANS's inertial components to a high degree of accuracy. In flight, the ANS, which sat behind the reconnaissance systems officer's (RSO's), position, tracked stars through a circular quartz glass window on the upper fuselage. Its "blue light" source star tracker, which could see stars during both day and night, would continuously track a variety of stars as the aircraft's changing position brought them into view. The system's digital computer ephemeris contained data on a list of stars used for celestial navigation: the list first included 56 stars and was later expanded to 61. The ANS could supply altitude and position to flight controls and other systems, including the mission data recorder, automatic navigation to preset destination points, automatic pointing and control of cameras and sensors, and optical or SLR sighting of fixed points loaded into the ANS before takeoff. According to Richard Graham, a former SR-71 pilot, the navigation system was good enough to limit drift to off the direction of travel at Mach 3.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71 originally included optical/infrared imagery systems; side-looking airborne radar (SLAR); electronic intelligence (ELINT) gathering systems; defensive systems for countering missile and airborne fighters; and recorders for SLAR, ELINT, and maintenance data. The SR-71 carried a Fairchild tracking camera and an infrared camera, both of which ran during the entire mission.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: As the SR-71 had a second cockpit behind the pilot for the RSO, it could not carry the A-12's principal sensor, a single large-focal-length optical camera that sat in the "Q-Bay" behind the A-12's single cockpit. Instead, the SR-71's camera systems could be located either in the fuselage chines or the removable nose/chine section. Wide-area imaging was provided by two of Itek's Operational Objective Cameras, which provided stereo imagery across the width of the flight track, or an Itek Optical Bar Camera, which gave continuous horizon-to-horizon coverage. A closer view of the target area was given by the HYCON Technical Objective Camera (TEOC), which could be directed up to 45° left or right of the centerline. Initially, the TEOCs could not match the resolution of the A-12's larger camera, but rapid improvements in both the camera and film improved this performance.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: SLAR, built by Goodyear Aerospace, could be carried in the removable nose. In later life, the radar was replaced by Loral's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System (ASARS-1). Both the first SLAR and ASARS-1 were ground-mapping imaging systems, collecting data either in fixed swaths left or right of centerline or from a spot location for higher resolution. ELINT-gathering systems, called the Electro Magnetic Reconnaissance System, built by AIL could be carried in the chine bays to analyze electronic signal fields being passed through, and were programmed to identify items of interest.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Over its operational life, the Blackbird carried various electronic countermeasures (ECMs), including warning and active electronic systems built by several ECM companies and called Systems A, A2, A2C, B, C, C2, E, G, H, and M. On a given mission, an aircraft carried several of these frequency/purpose payloads to meet the expected threats. Major Jerry Crew, an RSO, told "Air & Space/Smithsonian" that he used a jammer to try to confuse surface-to-air missile sites as their crews tracked his airplane, but once his threat-warning receiver told him a missile had been launched, he switched off the jammer to prevent the missile from homing in on its signal. After landing, information from the SLAR, ELINT gathering systems, and the maintenance data recorder were subjected to postflight ground analysis. In the later years of its operational life, a datalink system could send ASARS-1 and ELINT data from about of track coverage to a suitably equipped ground station.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Flying at meant that crews could not use standard masks, which could not provide enough oxygen above . Specialized protective pressurized suits were produced for crew members by the David Clark Company for the A-12, YF-12, M-21 and SR-71. Furthermore, an emergency ejection at Mach 3.2 would subject crews to temperatures of about ; thus, during a high-altitude ejection scenario, an onboard oxygen supply would keep the suit pressurized during the descent.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The cockpit could be pressurized to an altitude of during flight. The cabin needed a heavy-duty cooling system, as cruising at Mach 3.2 would heat the aircraft's external surface well beyond <ref name="PM06/91">"Popular Mechanics", June 1991, p. 28.</ref> and the inside of the windshield to . An air conditioner used a heat exchanger to dump heat from the cockpit into the fuel prior to combustion. The same air-conditioning system was also used to keep the front (nose) landing gear bay cool, thereby eliminating the need for the special aluminum-impregnated tires similar to those used on the main landing gear.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Blackbird pilots and RSOs were provided with food and drink for the long reconnaissance flights. Water bottles had long straws which crewmembers guided into an opening in the helmet by looking in a mirror. Food was contained in sealed containers similar to toothpaste tubes which delivered food to the crewmember's mouth through the helmet opening.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The first flight of an SR-71 took place on 22 December 1964, at USAF Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, piloted by Bob Gilliland. The SR-71 reached a top speed of Mach 3.4 during flight testing, with pilot Major Brian Shul reporting a speed in excess of Mach 3.5 on an operational sortie while evading a missile over Libya. The first SR-71 to enter service was delivered to the 4200th (later, 9th) Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base, California, in January 1966.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: SR-71s first arrived at the 9th SRW's Operating Location (OL-8) at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan on 8 March 1968. These deployments were code-named "Glowing Heat", while the program as a whole was code-named "Senior Crown". Reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam were code-named "Black Shield" and then renamed "Giant Scale" in late 1968. On 21 March 1968, Major (later General) Jerome F. O'Malley and Major Edward D. Payne flew the first operational SR-71 sortie in SR-71 serial number 61-7976 from Kadena AFB, Okinawa. During its career, this aircraft (976) accumulated 2,981 flying hours and flew 942 total sorties (more than any other SR-71), including 257 operational missions, from Beale AFB; Palmdale, California; Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan; and RAF Mildenhall, UK. The aircraft was flown to the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio in March 1990.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The USAF could fly each SR-71, on average, once per week, because of the extended turnaround required after mission recovery. Very often an aircraft would return with rivets missing, delaminated panels or other broken parts such as inlets requiring repair or replacement. There were cases of the aircraft not being ready to fly again for a month due to the repairs needed. Rob Vermeland, Lockheed Martin's manager of Advanced Development Program, said in an interview in 2015 that high-tempo operations were not realistic for the SR-71. "If we had one sitting in the hangar here and the crew chief was told there was a mission planned right now, then 19 hours later it would be safely ready to take off."


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: From the beginning of the Blackbird's reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam and Laos in 1968, the SR-71s averaged approximately one sortie a week for nearly two years. By 1970, the SR-71s were averaging two sorties per week, and by 1972, they were flying nearly one sortie every day. Two SR-71s were lost during these missions, one in 1970 and the second aircraft in 1972, both due to mechanical malfunctions. Over the course of its reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese fired approximately 800 SAMs at SR-71s, none of which managed to score a hit. Pilots did report that missiles launched without radar guidance and no launch detection, had passed as close as from the aircraft.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: While deployed at Okinawa, the SR-71s and their aircrew members gained the nickname Habu (as did the A-12s preceding them) after a pit viper indigenous to Japan, which the Okinawans thought the plane resembled.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Operational highlights for the entire Blackbird family (YF-12, A-12, and SR-71) as of about 1990 included:


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Only one crew member, Jim Zwayer, a Lockheed flight-test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist, was killed in a flight accident. The rest of the crew members ejected safely or evacuated their aircraft on the ground.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: An SR-71 was used domestically in 1971 to assist the FBI in their manhunt for the skyjacker D.B. Cooper. The Blackbird was to retrace and photograph the flightpath of the hijacked 727 from Seattle to Reno and attempt to locate any of items that Cooper was known to have parachuted with from the aircraft. Five flights were attempted but on each occasion no photographs of the flight path were obtained due to low visibility.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: European operations were from RAF Mildenhall, England. There were two routes. One was along the Norwegian west coast and up the Kola Peninsula, which contained several large naval bases belonging to the Soviet Navy's Northern Fleet. Over the years, there were several emergency landings in Norway, four in Bodø and two of them in 1981 (flying from Beale) and 1985. Rescue parties were sent in to repair the planes before leaving. On one occasion, one complete wing with engine was replaced as the easiest way to get the plane airborne again. The other route, from Mildenhall over the Baltic Sea, was known as the Baltic Express.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Swedish Air Force fighter pilots have managed to lock their radar on an SR-71 on multiple occasions within shooting range. Target illumination was maintained by feeding target location from ground-based radars to the fire-control computer in the JA 37 Viggen interceptor. The most common site for the lock-on was the thin stretch of international airspace between Öland and Gotland that the SR-71s used on their return flights.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: On 29 June 1987, an SR-71 was on a mission around the Baltic Sea to spy on Soviet postings when one of the engines exploded. The aircraft, which was at 20 km altitude, quickly lost altitude and turned 180° to the left and turned over Gotland to search for the Swedish coast. Thus, Swedish airspace was violated, whereupon two unarmed Saab JA 37 Viggens on an exercise at the height of Västervik were ordered there. The mission was to do an incident preparedness check and identify an aircraft of high interest. It was found that the plane was in obvious distress and a decision was made that the Swedish Air Force would escort the plane out of the Baltic Sea. A second round of armed JA-37s from Ängelholm replaced the first pair and completed the escort to Danish airspace. The event had been classified for over 30 years, and when the report was unsealed, data from the NSA showed that multiple MiG-25s with the order to shoot down the SR-71 or force it to land, had started right after the engine failure. A MiG-25 had locked a missile on the damaged SR-71, but as the aircraft was under escort, no missiles were fired. On 29 November 2018, the four Swedish pilots involved were awarded medals from the USAF.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: One widely conventional view, and probably the best-known view, of the reasons for the SR-71's retirement in 1989—a view that the Air Force itself offered to the Congress—was that besides being very expensive, the SR-71 had become redundant anyway, among other reconnaissance methods that were ever-evolving. However, another view held by various officers and legislators is that the SR-71 program was terminated owing to Pentagon politics, and not because the aircraft had become obsolete, irrelevant, too hard to maintain, or unsustainably expensive. Retired Colonel Richard H. Graham, a former 1st-SRS and 9th-SRW commander, presented in 1996 what he viewed as a factual summary, not an opinion, of how the SR-71 provided some intelligence capabilities that none of its alternatives (such as satellites, U-2s, and UAVs) were providing in the 1990s (when the SR-71 was retired and then re-retired from Air Force reconnaissance duty.) The chief question for opinion, beyond that point, was only how crucial, or disposable, those unique advantages properly were.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Graham noted that in the 1970s and early 1980s, SR-71 squadron and wing commanders were often promoted into higher positions as general officers within the USAF structure and the Pentagon. (In order to be selected into the SR-71 program in the first place, a pilot or navigator (RSO) had to be a top-quality USAF officer, so continuing career progression for members of this elite group was not surprising.) These generals were adept at communicating the value of the SR-71 to a USAF command staff and a Congress who often lacked a basic understanding of how the SR-71 worked and what it did. However, by the mid-1980s, these SR-71 generals all had retired, and a new generation of USAF generals mostly wanted to cut the program's budget and spend its funding on different priorities, such as the very expensive new B-2 Spirit strategic bomber program. Such generals had an interest in believing, and persuading the services and the Congress, that the SR-71 had become either entirely or almost entirely redundant to satellites, U-2s, incipient UAV programs, and an alleged top-secret successor already under development. Graham said that the last-mentioned one was only a sales pitch, not a fact, at the time in the 1990s.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The USAF may have seen the SR-71 as a bargaining chip to ensure the survival of other priorities. Also, the SR-71 program's "product", which was operational and strategic intelligence, was not seen by these generals as being very valuable to the USAF. The primary consumers of this intelligence were the CIA, NSA, and DIA. A general misunderstanding of the nature of aerial reconnaissance and a lack of knowledge about the SR-71 in particular (due to its secretive development and operations) was used by detractors to discredit the aircraft, with the assurance given that a replacement was under development. Dick Cheney told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the SR-71 cost $85,000 per hour to operate. Opponents estimated the aircraft's support cost at $400 to $700 million per year, though the cost was actually closer to $300 million.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71, while much more capable than the Lockheed U-2 in terms of range, speed, and survivability, suffered the lack of a data link, which the U-2 had been upgraded to carry. This meant that much of the SR-71's imagery and radar data could not be used in real time, but had to wait until the aircraft returned to base. This lack of immediate real-time capability was used as one of the justifications to close down the program. The counterargument was that the longer the SR-71 was not upgraded as aggressively as it ought to have been, the more people could say that it was obsolescent, which was in their interest as champions of other programs (a self-fulfilling bias). Attempts to add a datalink to the SR-71 were stymied early on by the same factions in the Pentagon and Congress who were already set on the program's demise, even in the early 1980s. These same factions also forced expensive sensor upgrades to the SR-71, which did little to increase its mission capabilities, but could be used as justification for complaining about the cost of the program.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: In 1988, Congress was convinced to allocate $160,000 to keep six SR-71s and a trainer model in flyable storage that could become flightworthy within 60 days. However, the USAF refused to spend the money. While the SR-71 survived attempts to retire it in 1988, partly due to the unmatched ability to provide high-quality coverage of the Kola Peninsula for the US Navy, the decision to retire the SR-71 from active duty came in 1989, with the last missions flown in October that year. Four months after the plane's retirement, General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., was told that the expedited reconnaissance, which the SR-71 could have provided, was unavailable during Operation Desert Storm.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71 program's main operational capabilities came to a close at the end of fiscal year 1989 (October 1989). The 1st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron (1 SRS) kept its pilots and aircraft operational and active, and flew some operational reconnaissance missions through the end of 1989 and into 1990, due to uncertainty over the timing of the final termination of funding for the program. The squadron finally closed in mid-1990, and the aircraft were distributed to static display locations, with a number kept in reserve storage.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Due to unease over political situations in the Middle East and North Korea, the U.S. Congress re-examined the SR-71 beginning in 1993. Rear Admiral Thomas F. Hall addressed the question of why the SR-71 was retired, saying it was under "the belief that, given the time delay associated with mounting a mission, conducting a reconnaissance, retrieving the data, processing it, and getting it out to a field commander, that you had a problem in timelines that was not going to meet the tactical requirements on the modern battlefield. And the determination was that if one could take advantage of technology and develop a system that could get that data back real time... that would be able to meet the unique requirements of the tactical commander." Hall also stated they were "looking at alternative means of doing [the job of the SR-71]."


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Macke told the committee that they were "flying U-2s, RC-135s, [and] other strategic and tactical assets" to collect information in some areas. Senator Robert Byrd and other senators complained that the "better than" successor to the SR-71 had yet to be developed at the cost of the "good enough" serviceable aircraft. They maintained that, in a time of constrained military budgets, designing, building, and testing an aircraft with the same capabilities as the SR-71 would be impossible.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Congress's disappointment with the lack of a suitable replacement for the Blackbird was cited concerning whether to continue funding imaging sensors on the U-2. Congressional conferees stated the "experience with the SR-71 serves as a reminder of the pitfalls of failing to keep existing systems up-to-date and capable in the hope of acquiring other capabilities." It was agreed to add $100 million to the budget to return three SR-71s to service, but it was emphasized that this "would not prejudice support for long-endurance UAVs" [such as the Global Hawk]. The funding was later cut to $72.5 million. The Skunk Works was able to return the aircraft to service under budget at $72 million.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Retired USAF Colonel Jay Murphy was made the Program Manager for Lockheed's reactivation plans. Retired USAF Colonels Don Emmons and Barry MacKean were put under government contract to remake the plane's logistic and support structure. Still-active USAF pilots and Reconnaissance Systems Officers (RSOs) who had worked with the aircraft were asked to volunteer to fly the reactivated planes. The aircraft was under the command and control of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base and flew out of a renovated hangar at Edwards Air Force Base. Modifications were made to provide a data-link with "near real-time" transmission of the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar's imagery to sites on the ground.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The reactivation met much resistance: the USAF had not budgeted for the aircraft, and UAV developers worried that their programs would suffer if money was shifted to support the SR-71s. Also, with the allocation requiring yearly reaffirmation by Congress, long-term planning for the SR-71 was difficult. In 1996, the USAF claimed that specific funding had not been authorized, and moved to ground the program. Congress reauthorized the funds, but, in October 1997, President Bill Clinton attempted to use the line-item veto to cancel the $39 million allocated for the SR-71. In June 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the line-item veto was unconstitutional. All this left the SR-71's status uncertain until September 1998, when the USAF called for the funds to be redistributed; the USAF permanently retired it in 1998.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: NASA operated the two last airworthy Blackbirds until 1999. All other Blackbirds have been moved to museums except for the two SR-71s and a few D-21 drones retained by the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center (later renamed the Armstrong Flight Research Center).


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71 was the world's fastest and highest-flying air-breathing operational manned aircraft throughout its career and it still holds that record. On 28 July 1976, SR-71 serial number 61-7962, piloted by then Captain Robert Helt, broke the world record: an "absolute altitude record" of . Several aircraft have exceeded this altitude in zoom climbs, but not in sustained flight. That same day SR-71 serial number 61-7958 set an absolute speed record of , approximately Mach 3.3. SR-71 pilot Brian Shul states in his book "The Untouchables" that he flew in excess of Mach 3.5 on 15 April 1986 over Libya to evade a missile.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: The SR-71 also holds the "speed over a recognized course" record for flying from New York to London—distance , , and an elapsed time of 1 hour 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds—set on 1 September 1974, while flown by USAF pilot James V. Sullivan and Noel F. Widdifield, reconnaissance systems officer (RSO). This equates to an average speed of about Mach 2.72, including deceleration for in-flight refueling. Peak speeds during this flight were likely closer to the declassified top speed of over Mach 3.2. For comparison, the best commercial Concorde flight time was 2 hours 52 minutes and the Boeing 747 averages 6 hours 15 minutes.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: On 26 April 1971, 61-7968, flown by majors Thomas B. Estes and Dewain C. Vick, flew over in 10 hours and 30 minutes. This flight was awarded the 1971 Mackay Trophy for the "most meritorious flight of the year" and the 1972 Harmon Trophy for "most outstanding international achievement in the art/science of aeronautics".


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: When the SR-71 was retired in 1990, one Blackbird was flown from its birthplace at USAF Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, to go on exhibit at what is now the Smithsonian Institution's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. On 6 March 1990, Lt. Col. Raymond E. and Lt. Col. Joseph T. Vida piloted SR-71 S/N 61-7972 on its final Senior Crown flight and set four new speed records in the process:


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: These four speed records were accepted by the National Aeronautic Association (NAA), the recognized body for aviation records in the United States. Additionally, "Air & Space/Smithsonian" reported that the USAF clocked the SR-71 at one point in its flight reaching . After the Los Angeles–Washington flight, on 6 March 1990, Senator John Glenn addressed the United States Senate, chastising the Department of Defense for not using the SR-71 to its full potential:


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Speculation existed regarding a replacement for the SR-71, including a rumored aircraft codenamed Aurora. The limitations of reconnaissance satellites, which take up to 24 hours to arrive in the proper orbit to photograph a particular target, make them slower to respond to demand than reconnaissance planes. The fly-over orbit of spy satellites may also be predicted and can allow assets to be hidden when the satellite passes, a drawback not shared by aircraft. Thus, there are doubts that the US has abandoned the concept of spy planes to complement reconnaissance satellites. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also used for aerial reconnaissance in the 21st century, being able to overfly hostile territory without putting human pilots at risk, as well as being smaller and harder to detect than manned aircraft.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: On 1 November 2013, media outlets reported that Skunk Works has been working on an unmanned reconnaissance airplane it has named SR-72, which would fly twice as fast as the SR-71, at Mach 6. However, the USAF is officially pursuing the Northrop Grumman RQ-180 UAV to assume the SR-71's strategic ISR role.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: Twelve SR-71s were lost and one pilot died in accidents during the aircraft's service career. Eleven of these accidents happened between 1966 and 1972.


title: Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird

text: After completion of all USAF and NASA SR-71 operations at Edwards AFB, the SR-71 Flight Simulator was moved in July 2006 to the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field Airport in Dallas, Texas.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lalisa Manobal (also spelled Manoban; born Pranpriya Manobal; March 27, 1997), known mononymously as Lisa, is a Thai rapper, singer and dancer. She is a member of the South Korean girl group Blackpink formed by YG Entertainment.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lisa made her solo debut with her single album "Lalisa" in September 2021. The album sold over 736,000 copies in its release week in South Korea, making her the first female artist to do so. The music video for its lead single of the same name recorded 73.6 million views on YouTube in first 24 hours of its release, becoming the most-viewed music video in the first 24 hours on the platform by a solo artist. The song earned Lisa two Guinness World Records as well as the first MTV Video Music Award ever won by a K-pop soloist.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Born as Pranpriya Manobal on March 27, 1997 in Buriram Province, Thailand, she later legally changed her name to Lalisa, meaning the one being praised, on the advice of a fortune teller in order to bring in prosperity. As an only child, she was raised by her Thai mother and Swiss stepfather. Lisa's mother is named Chitthip Brüschweiler. Her stepfather is Marco Brüschweiler, a chef, currently active in Thailand. Lisa completed secondary education at Praphamontree School I and II.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: After starting dance classes at the age of four, she competed regularly in dance contests throughout her childhood, including in "To Be Number One", and joined the eleven-member dance crew We Zaa Cool alongside BamBam of Got7. In September 2009, the group entered the competition" LG Entertainment Million Dream Sanan World" broadcast on Channel 9 and won the "Special Team" Award. Lisa also participated in a singing contest as a school representative for "Top 3 Good Morals of Thailand", hosted by the Moral Promotion Center in early 2009, where she finished as a runner-up.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In 2010, 13-year-old Lisa auditioned to join South Korean record label YG Entertainment in Thailand. From a young age, Lisa gained an interest in K-pop idols, namely admiring artists Big Bang and 2NE1, and wished to someday follow a similar path. Among the 4,000 applicants, she was the only individual to qualify, which prompted then CEO, Yang Hyun-suk into offering Lisa a chance to become a YG Entertainment trainee. Lisa also impressed one of the judges, Danny Im of 1TYM, at the auditions, with him later praising her on-stage confidence and her off-stage attitude.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In 2011, Lisa moved to South Korea to begin her formal training as a trainee, which lasted five years. She officially joined the label as their first non-ethnically Korean trainee on April 11, 2011. In November 2013, she appeared in Taeyang's music video for the single "Ringa Linga" as a background dancer, alongside members of iKon and Winner. In March 2015, Lisa undertook her first modelling job for street-wear brand Nona9on, following South Korean cosmetics brand Moonshot in 2016.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In August 2016, Lisa debuted as one of four members of South Korean girl group Blackpink, as well as the first non-ethnically Korean to debut under the agency. Blackpink debuted with single album "Square One" with lead singles "Whistle" and "Boombayah". "Whistle" achieved a perfect "all-kill", topping all South Korean charts upon debut. As of September 2022, the group has released three studio albums, "Blackpink" "in Your Area", "The Album" and "Born Pink", three extended plays, "Blackpink", "Square Up" and "Kill This Love", and two single albums, "Square One" and "Square Two".


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lisa was cast by the MBC military variety program "Real Man 300" as a permanent member on the show as part of the Korea Army Academy edition from September 21, 2018, onward. The show marked her first permanent role on a television program since debut. Her appearance earned her an unofficial award titled "Character of the Year" through the 2018 MBC Entertainment Awards.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On November 5, 2018, she unveiled her YouTube channel, "Lilifilm Official", focusing on travelling and lifestyle alongside dance performances. As of July 2019, she accumulated over 1.3 million subscribers, and received a YouTube Gold Play Button. Notably, one of the dance performance videos went viral in 2020 due to a meme where screen caps of her legs were juxtaposed onto a character or public figure's torso, often with the caption "Did it work?". Celebrities including Dolly Parton, Stephen Colbert. James Corden, Luke Evans, and Lil Nas X participated in the meme as well, posting photos of themselves with Lisa's legs.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In March 2020, Lisa served as the dance mentor throughout the iQIYI's Chinese girl group survival program "Youth With You Season 2". In February 2021, she returned as the dance mentor in the Chinese boy group survival show "Youth With You Season 3."


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On April 19, 2021, an official from YG Entertainment revealed to South Korean media outlet "The Korea Herald" that Lisa would debut as the third soloist from her group with schedules later to be officially announced through a notice. On July 12, through "Star News", her label revealed filming for her music video is going underway.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lisa's debut single album "Lalisa" and its lead single of the same name were released on September 10, 2021. Upon release, the music video for "Lalisa" became the most-viewed video by a soloist in 24 hours with 73.6 million views, breaking the record held by Taylor Swift's "Me!" featuring Brendon Urie, which received 65.2 million views in 24 hours. The song debuted at number 84 on the US "Billboard" Hot 100 and at number two on the "Billboard" Global 200, becoming Lisa's first top-ten hit on the latter. The single album sold 736,221 copies in Korea on the first week of release, setting the record for the highest first-week sales among all female artists and making Lisa the first female soloist to achieve 500,000 copies in first-week sales. Following its success, B-side track "Money" was sent as the album's second single to US contemporary hit radio and peaked at number 90 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and at number ten on the "Billboard" Global 200, earning Lisa her second career entries on both charts and her second top-ten global hit.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In October 2021, Lisa confirmed her collaboration with DJ Snake, Ozuna, and Megan Thee Stallion by dropping a teaser of the song. Entitled "SG", it included songwriting and composing credits for Lisa and was released on October 22 alongside the music video. The collaboration debuted at number 19 on the "Billboard" Global 200 and at number two on the US Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, and became her first number-one song on the Latin Airplay chart.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On August 28, 2022, Lisa won the MTV Video Music Award for Best K-Pop Video for "Lalisa" and became the first solo K-pop artist in history to win an MTV Video Music Award.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lisa is multilingual; she speaks fluent Thai, English, and Korean, along with basic Japanese and Chinese. She is based in South Korea.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Through her work as a model for the South Korean cosmetics brand Moonshot, she became their brand ambassador in China on March 21, 2018.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On July 25, 2019, Lisa became the brand ambassador and presenter exclusively for the new collection launched in Thailand where six of the products include Manoban's signature as part of the packaging. On March 28, 2019, Lisa signed her first solo endorsement deal for AIS Thailand, the largest GSM mobile phone operator in Thailand. Lisa became the highest-paid brand presenter for AIS. Furthermore, her advertising campaign became the highest-rated commercial in Thailand. On May 11, 2019, Lisa became the brand presenter for the Samsung Galaxy S10 in Thailand. Her first promotional material for the brand was released on May 14. The mobile game "Ragnarok M: Eternal Love" uses Lisa as their endorsement model and appears as a character on their "Midnight Party" server from July 24, 2019, onward.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In January 2020, Lisa joined labelmate Winner's Mino as an endorsement model for sportswear brand Adidas's SS20 season "My Shelter" clothing range. Through Lisa's newfound popularity in China through her appearance on iQIYI's Youth With You 2 as a dance mentor, she was revealed to be the new brand spokesperson in China for the fabric softener company D&G Downy on May 13. She soon went on to become the new brand spokesperson for one of China's largest dairy companies, Mengniu Dairy's Chinese yoghurt brand, Zhengouli. On June 27, Tencent Games announced Lisa as Supercell's newest spokesperson in China for their mobile video game, Brawl Stars. In October 2020, Lauder-owned MAC had named Lisa as their newest global brand ambassador. She became the face of their renowned collections and key campaigns as well as muse for innovation projects. "Always confident and never one to shy away from risks, she embodies our commitment to celebrating individuality and self-expression above all else," explained Senior Vice President and Global Creative Director, Drew Elliott. "We can't wait for her fans to see what she has in store for them through our collaboration".


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On February 22, 2021, Lisa was announced as the endorser of the Vivo S9 smartphone. She was also an endorser of the Vivo S7 smartphone in 2020. In March 2022, Lisa became the brand ambassador to whiskey brand Chivas Regal and starred in "I Rise, We Rise" campaign.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In January 2019, Lisa became the muse of Hedi Slimane, the artistic, creative and image director for Celine, a French luxury brand. In September 2020, she was announced as their global ambassador. She was featured in the brand's Essentials campaign in June 2020, shot by creative director Hedi Slimane and has been widely photographed in Celine outfits and accessories. In a statement, the brand said, “We are pleased to announce the continued collaboration of Celine with Lisa, who will represent the house as Global Ambassador”.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: The same year, in November, Penshoppe revealed Lisa had joined the Penshoppe family as their newest ambassador. Furthermore, on July 24, 2020, Lisa was officially selected as the newest brand ambassador representing Bulgari, an Italian luxury brand. As an ambassador for Bulgari, she participated in the digital campaigns for the "Serpenti" and "Bzero One" collections.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Through YG Entertainment, Lisa released a limited edition photobook entitled "0327" composed entirely with self-taken photographs through a film camera. The photobook was released on her birthday in 2020. The second volume was released the following year on March 27, 2021.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On November 13, 2021, it was revealed that Lisa would be releasing her own collection with American beauty brand MAC Cosmetics, titled “MAC x L”. Her collection includes powder blushes, eyeliner, an eyeshadow palette, and a face powder.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: On September 17, 2019, after torrential rain brought by a monsoon caused flooding across 32 Thai provinces, Thai beauty blogger Koi Onusa, a relative of Lisa, revealed that Lisa had donated ฿100,000 to Thai actor Bin Bunluerit's fund to help those evacuated in the floods as disaster relief.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In September 2021, Lisa expressed an interest in joining a social program led by the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange in partnership with YG Entertainment for Buriram Province, and soon launched an online account to help collect donations. The partnership between the foundation and YG Entertainment aims to build a 160 square meter cultural compound at Non Suwan Phitthayakhom School in Buriram, among other things which includes providing computers, projectors and other multimedia equipment to the school and establish a K-pop dance academy staffed by local instructors.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lisa has often been cited as an influence to other individuals working in the same field as a musician within the South Korean music industry. Through interviews, former Nature girl group member, Gaga and Hot Issue girl group member, Mayna revealed Lisa as their role models.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: In April 2019, she became the most followed K-pop idol on Instagram, with 17.4 million followers at the time. As of April 2021, she became the first and only K-pop idol to amass 50 million followers, as she continues to set engagement and follower count records on the platform.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: While Lisa landed her first solo magazine cover for "Harper's Bazaar" Thailand's May 2019 issue, MEI, a distributor of "Harper's Bazaar", reported that all 120,000 printed copies in stock were sold out. It was reported that, on average, 30,000 copies are normally printed, and well-known celebrities have an average of 60,000 copies printed. However, despite selling 120,000 copies, the public's demand was still not met.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Following Lisa's attendance at the Celine Fashion Show for Men's Spring Summer 2020 collection in Paris, France, during Paris Fashion Week, Lyst reported that global searches for Celine's Triomphe bag leapt 66% on June 28, 2019, after she published an image of the style on her social media, in result garnering the attention of many among the general public.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: According to the "2021 Overseas Korean Wave Survey" conducted by the organization's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange, Lisa was listed as one of twenty "Most Popular Korean Singers Abroad" alongside South Korean musicians G-Dragon, IU, Psy, Blackpink and more. The survey collected data throughout 18 countries worldwide including China, India, Australia, South Africa and Russia. A total of 8,500 men and women aged between 15 and 59 participated in the survey. In a 2021 survey conducted by YouGov, a British international agency, Lisa was chosen as one of the twenty most admired women in the world alongside Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie, Queen Elizabeth II, and more.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Lisa's announcement as MAC Cosmetics’ first female K-pop idol to be appointed as a Global Brand Ambassador generated $1.83M in MIV®, with MAC's announcement post generating $506K in MIV® – representing their top branded post of 2020 and making them one of the top beauty collaborations of the year. Her announcement post on Instagram as a Global Ambassador for MAC Cosmetics received more than 5.6 million likes and 74,000 comments. Her partnerships have been noted to feel genuine as she frequently features the same brands across her social media channels. The success of her endorsements and partnerships has been partially attributed to this authenticity. Because of her influencing power and marketing potential, Lisa has been used as an example of changing promotional strategies in the fashion and makeup industry.


title: Lisa (rapper)

text: Her impact extends to other artists in the music industry. Destiny Rogers' song "Tomboy" had a 1939% increase in streams on the daily Spotify update following a dance performance video by Lisa on her YouTube channel using it. Shortly after the performance was uploaded to YouTube, Rogers' song and EP Tomboy entered iTunes and Apple Music charts in numerous countries. On Spotify the song reached the Top 200 and the top 10 of the Philippines Viral 50 playlist. Rogers herself acknowledged the situation on Twitter and thanked Lisa for revitalizing the song. Lisa was praised by Thailand's prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, for promoting Thai culture in her "Lalisa" music video.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Sherlock Holmes () is a fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: First appearing in print in 1887's "A Study in Scarlet", the character's popularity became widespread with the first series of short stories in "The Strand Magazine", beginning with "A Scandal in Bohemia" in 1891; additional tales appeared from then until 1927, eventually totalling four novels and 56 short stories. All but one are set in the Victorian or Edwardian eras, between about 1880 and 1914. Most are narrated by the character of Holmes's friend and biographer Dr. John H. Watson, who usually accompanies Holmes during his investigations and often shares quarters with him at the address of 221B Baker Street, London, where many of the stories begin.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Though not the first fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes is arguably the best known. By the 1990s, there were already over 25,000 stage adaptations, films, television productions and publications featuring the detective, and "Guinness World Records" lists him as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history. Holmes's popularity and fame are such that many have believed him to be not a fictional character but a real individual; numerous literary and fan societies have been founded on this pretence. Avid readers of the Holmes stories helped create the modern practice of fandom. The character and stories have had a profound and lasting effect on mystery writing and popular culture as a whole, with the original tales as well as thousands written by authors other than Conan Doyle being adapted into stage and radio plays, television, films, video games, and other media for over one hundred years.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin is generally acknowledged as the first detective in fiction and served as the prototype for many later characters, including Holmes. Conan Doyle once wrote, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed ... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" Similarly, the stories of Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq were extremely popular at the time Conan Doyle began writing Holmes, and Holmes's speech and behaviour sometimes follow those of Lecoq. Doyle has his main characters discuss these literary antecedents near the beginning of "A Study in Scarlet", which is set soon after Watson is first introduced to Holmes. Watson attempts to compliment Holmes by comparing him to Dupin, to which Holmes replies that he found Dupin to be "a very inferior fellow" and Lecoq to be "a miserable bungler".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Conan Doyle repeatedly said that Holmes was inspired by the real-life figure of Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, whom Conan Doyle met in 1877 and had worked for as a clerk. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing broad conclusions from minute observations. However, he later wrote to Conan Doyle: "You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it". Sir Henry Littlejohn, Chair of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, is also cited as an inspiration for Holmes. Littlejohn, who was also Police Surgeon and Medical Officer of Health in Edinburgh, provided Conan Doyle with a link between medical investigation and the detection of crime.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Other possible inspirations have been proposed, though never acknowledged by Doyle, such as "Maximilien Heller", by French author Henry Cauvain. In this 1871 novel (sixteen years before the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), Henry Cauvain imagined a depressed, anti-social, opium-smoking polymath detective, operating in Paris. It is not known if Conan Doyle read the novel, but he was fluent in French. Similarly, Michael Harrison suggested that a German self-styled "consulting detective" named Walter Scherer may have been the model for Holmes.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Details of Sherlock Holmes's life in Conan Doyle's stories are scarce and often vague. Nevertheless, mentions of his early life and extended family paint a loose biographical picture of the detective.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: A statement of Holmes's age in "His Last Bow" places his year of birth at 1854; the story, set in August 1914, describes him as sixty years of age. His parents are not mentioned, although Holmes mentions that his "ancestors" were "country squires". In "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter", he claims that his grandmother was sister to the French artist Vernet, without clarifying whether this was Claude Joseph, Carle, or Horace Vernet. Holmes's brother Mycroft, seven years his senior, is a government official. Mycroft has a unique civil service position as a kind of human database for all aspects of government policy. Sherlock describes his brother as the more intelligent of the two, but notes that Mycroft lacks any interest in physical investigation, preferring to spend his time at the Diogenes Club.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes says that he first developed his methods of deduction as an undergraduate; his earliest cases, which he pursued as an amateur, came from fellow university students. A meeting with a classmate's father led him to adopt detection as a profession.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Financial difficulties lead Holmes and Dr. Watson to share rooms together at 221B Baker Street, London. Their residence is maintained by their landlady, Mrs. Hudson. Holmes works as a detective for twenty-three years, with Watson assisting him for seventeen of those years. Most of the stories are frame narratives written from Watson's point of view, as summaries of the detective's most interesting cases. Holmes frequently calls Watson's records of Holmes's cases sensational and populist, suggesting that they fail to accurately and objectively report the "science" of his craft:


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Nevertheless, Holmes's friendship with Watson is his most significant relationship. When Watson is injured by a bullet, although the wound turns out to be "quite superficial", Watson is moved by Holmes's reaction:


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: After confirming Watson's assessment of the wound, Holmes makes it clear to their opponent that the man would not have left the room alive if he genuinely had killed Watson. When Holmes recorded a case or two himself, he was forced to concede that he could more easily understand the need to write it in a manner that would appeal to the public rather than his intention to focus on his own technical skill.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes's clients vary from the most powerful monarchs and governments of Europe, to wealthy aristocrats and industrialists, to impoverished pawnbrokers and governesses. He is known only in select professional circles at the beginning of the first story, but is already collaborating with Scotland Yard. However, his continued work and the publication of Watson's stories raise Holmes's profile, and he rapidly becomes well known as a detective; so many clients ask for his help instead of (or in addition to) that of the police that, Watson writes, by 1887 "Europe was ringing with his name" and by 1895 Holmes has "an immense practice". Police outside London ask Holmes for assistance if he is nearby. A Prime Minister and the King of Bohemia visit 221B Baker Street in person to request Holmes's assistance; the President of France awards him the Legion of Honour for capturing an assassin; the King of Scandinavia is a client; and he aids the Vatican at least twice. The detective acts on behalf of the British government in matters of national security several times, and declines a knighthood "for services which may perhaps some day be described". However, he does not actively seek fame and is usually content to let the police take public credit for his work.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The first set of Holmes stories was published between 1887 and 1893. Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in a final battle with the criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty in "The Final Problem" (published 1893, but set in 1891), as Conan Doyle felt that "my literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel." However, the reaction of the public surprised Doyle very much. Distressed readers wrote anguished letters to "The Strand Magazine", which suffered a terrible blow when 20,000 people cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in protest. Conan Doyle himself received many protest letters, and one lady even began her letter with "You brute". Legend has it that Londoners were so distraught upon hearing the news of Holmes's death that they wore black armbands in mourning, though there is no known contemporary source for this; the earliest known reference to such events comes from 1949. However, the recorded public reaction to Holmes's death was unlike anything previously seen for fictional events.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: After resisting public pressure for eight years, Conan Doyle wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (serialised in 1901–02, with an implicit setting before Holmes's death). In 1903, Conan Doyle wrote "The Adventure of the Empty House"; set in 1894, Holmes reappears, explaining to a stunned Watson that he had faked his death to fool his enemies. Following "The Adventure of the Empty House", Conan Doyle would sporadically write new Holmes stories until 1927.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes aficionados refer to the period from 1891 to 1894—between his disappearance and presumed death in "The Final Problem" and his reappearance in "The Adventure of the Empty House"—as the Great Hiatus. The earliest known use of this expression dates to 1946.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In "His Last Bow", the reader is told that Holmes has retired to a small farm on the Sussex Downs and taken up beekeeping as his primary occupation. The move is not dated precisely, but can be presumed to be no later than 1904 (since it is referred to retrospectively in "The Adventure of the Second Stain", first published that year). The story features Holmes and Watson coming out of retirement to aid the British war effort. Only one other adventure, "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane", takes place during the detective's retirement.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Watson describes Holmes as "bohemian" in his habits and lifestyle. Said to have a "cat-like" love of personal cleanliness, at the same time Holmes is an eccentric with no regard for contemporary standards of tidiness or good order. Watson describes him as


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: While Holmes can be dispassionate and cold, during an investigation he is animated and excitable. He has a flair for showmanship, often keeping his methods and evidence hidden until the last possible moment so as to impress observers. His companion condones the detective's willingness to bend the truth (or break the law) on behalf of a client—lying to the police, concealing evidence or breaking into houses—when he feels it morally justifiable.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Except for that of Watson, Holmes avoids casual company. In "The "Gloria Scott"", he tells the doctor that during two years at college he made only one friend: "I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson ... I never mixed much with the men of my year". The detective goes without food at times of intense intellectual activity, believing that "the faculties become refined when you starve them." At times Holmes relaxes with music, either playing the violin, or enjoying the works of composers such as Wagner and Pablo de Sarasate.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes occasionally uses addictive drugs, especially in the absence of stimulating cases. He sometimes used morphine and sometimes cocaine, the latter of which he injects in a seven-percent solution; both drugs were legal in 19th-century England. As a physician, Watson strongly disapproves of his friend's cocaine habit, describing it as the detective's only vice, and concerned about its effect on Holmes's mental health and intellect. In "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter", Watson says that although he has "weaned" Holmes from drugs, the detective remains an addict whose habit is "not dead, but merely sleeping".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Watson and Holmes both use tobacco, smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Although his chronicler does not consider Holmes's smoking a vice "per se", Watson—a physician—does criticise the detective for creating a "poisonous atmosphere" in their confined quarters.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes is known to charge clients for his expenses and claim any reward offered for a problem's solution, such as in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", "The Red-Headed League", and "The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet". The detective states at one point that "My professional charges are upon a fixed scale. I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether". In this context, a client is offering to double his fee, and it is implied that wealthy clients habitually pay Holmes more than his standard rate. In "The Adventure of the Priory School", Holmes earns a £6,000 fee (at a time where annual expenses for a rising young professional were in the area of £500). However, Watson notes that Holmes would refuse to help even the wealthy and powerful if their cases did not interest him.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: As Conan Doyle wrote to Joseph Bell, "Holmes is as inhuman as a Babbage's Calculating Machine and just about as likely to fall in love". Holmes says of himself that he is "not a whole-souled admirer of womankind", and that he finds "the motives of women ... inscrutable. ... How can you build on such quicksand? Their most trivial actions may mean volumes..." In "The Sign of Four", he says, "Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them", a feeling Watson notes as an "atrocious sentiment". In "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane", Holmes writes, "Women have seldom been an attraction to me, for my brain has always governed my heart". At the end of "The Sign of Four", Holmes states that "love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement." Ultimately, Holmes claims outright that "I have never loved".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: But while Watson says that the detective has an "aversion to women", he also notes Holmes as having "a peculiarly ingratiating way with [them]". Watson notes that their housekeeper Mrs. Hudson is fond of Holmes because of his "remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent". However, in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", the detective becomes engaged under false pretenses in order to obtain information about a case, abandoning the woman once he has the information he requires.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Irene Adler is a retired American opera singer and actress who appears in "A Scandal in Bohemia". Although this is her only appearance, she is one of only a handful of people who best Holmes in a battle of wits, and the only woman. For this reason, Adler is the frequent subject of pastiche writing. The beginning of the story describes the high regard in which Holmes holds her:


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Five years before the story's events, Adler had a brief liaison with Crown Prince of Bohemia Wilhelm von Ormstein. As the story opens, the Prince is engaged to another. Fearful that the marriage would be called off if his fiancée's family learns of this past impropriety, Ormstein hires Holmes to regain a photograph of Adler and himself. Adler slips away before Holmes can succeed. Her memory is kept alive by the photograph of Adler that Holmes received for his part in the case.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Shortly after meeting Holmes in the first story, "A Study in Scarlet" (generally assumed to be 1881, though the exact date is not given), Watson assesses the detective's abilities:


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In "A Study in Scarlet", Holmes claims to be unaware that the earth revolves around the sun since such information is irrelevant to his work; after hearing that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget it. The detective believes that the mind has a finite capacity for information storage, and learning useless things reduces one's ability to learn useful things. The later stories move away from this notion: in "The Valley of Fear", he says, "All knowledge comes useful to the detective", and in "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane", the detective calls himself "an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles". Looking back on the development of the character in 1912, Conan Doyle wrote that "In the first one, the "Study in Scarlet", [Holmes] was a mere calculating machine, but I had to make him more of an educated human being as I went on with him."


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Despite Holmes's supposed ignorance of politics, in "A Scandal in Bohemia" he immediately recognises the true identity of the disguised "Count von Kramm". At the end of "A Study in Scarlet", Holmes demonstrates a knowledge of Latin. The detective cites Hafez, Goethe, as well as a letter from Gustave Flaubert to George Sand in the original French. In "The Hound of the Baskervilles," the detective recognises works by Godfrey Kneller and Joshua Reynolds: "Watson won't allow that I know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy since our views upon the subject differ". In "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans", Watson says that "Holmes lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus", considered "the last word" on the subject—which must have been the result of an intensive and very specialized musicological study which could have had no possible application to the solution of criminal mysteries.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes is a cryptanalyst, telling Watson that "I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writing, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I analyse one hundred and sixty separate ciphers". Holmes also demonstrates a knowledge of psychology in "A Scandal in Bohemia", luring Irene Adler into betraying where she hid a photograph based on the premise that a woman will rush to save her most valued possession from a fire. Another example is in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", where Holmes obtains information from a salesman with a wager: "When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the 'Pink 'un' protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet ... I daresay that if I had put 100 pounds down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Maria Konnikova points out in an interview with D. J. Grothe that Holmes practises what is now called mindfulness, concentrating on one thing at a time, and almost never "multitasks". She adds that in this he predates the science showing how helpful this is to the brain.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes observes the dress and attitude of his clients and suspects, noting skin marks (such as tattoos), contamination (such as ink stains or clay on boots), emotional state, and physical condition in order to deduce their origins and recent history. The style and state of wear of a person's clothes and personal items are also commonly relied on; in the stories Holmes is seen applying his method to items such as walking sticks, pipes, and hats. For example, in "A Scandal in Bohemia", Holmes infers that Watson had got wet lately and had "a most clumsy and careless servant girl". When Watson asks how Holmes knows this, the detective answers:


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In the first Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet", Dr. Watson compares Holmes to C. Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective, who employed a similar methodology. Alluding to an episode in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", where Dupin determines what his friend is thinking despite their having walked together in silence for a quarter of an hour, Holmes remarks: "That trick of his breaking in on his friend's thoughts with an apropos remark... is really very showy and superficial". Nevertheless, Holmes later performs the same 'trick' on Watson in "The Cardboard Box" and "The Adventure of the Dancing Men".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Though the stories always refer to Holmes's intellectual detection method as "deduction", he primarily relies on abduction: inferring an explanation for observed details. "From a drop of water", he writes, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other". However, Holmes does employ deductive reasoning as well. The detective's guiding principle, as he says in "The Sign of Four", is: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Despite Holmes's remarkable reasoning abilities, Conan Doyle still paints him as fallible in this regard (this being a central theme of "The Yellow Face").


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Though Holmes is famed for his reasoning capabilities, his investigative technique relies heavily on the acquisition of hard evidence. Many of the techniques he employs in the stories were at the time in their infancy.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The detective is particularly skilled in the analysis of trace evidence and other physical evidence, including latent prints (such as footprints, hoof prints, and shoe and tire impressions) to identify actions at a crime scene; using tobacco ashes and cigarette butts to identify criminals; handwriting analysis and graphology; comparing typewritten letters to expose a fraud; using gunpowder residue to expose two murderers; and analyzing small pieces of human remains to expose two murders.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Because of the small scale of much of his evidence, the detective often uses a magnifying glass at the scene and an optical microscope at his Baker Street lodgings. He uses analytical chemistry for blood residue analysis and toxicology to detect poisons; Holmes's home chemistry laboratory is mentioned in "The Naval Treaty". Ballistics feature in "The Adventure of the Empty House" when spent bullets are recovered to be matched with a suspected murder weapon, a practice which became regular police procedure only some fifteen years after the story was published.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Laura J. Snyder has examined Holmes's methods in the context of mid- to late-19th-century criminology, demonstrating that, while sometimes in advance of what official investigative departments were formally using at the time, they were based upon existing methods and techniques. For example, fingerprints were proposed to be distinct in Conan Doyle's day, and while Holmes used a thumbprint to solve a crime in "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" (generally held to be set in 1895), the story was published in 1903, two years after Scotland Yard's fingerprint bureau opened. Though the effect of the Holmes stories on the development of forensic science has thus often been overstated, Holmes inspired future generations of forensic scientists to think scientifically and analytically.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes displays a strong aptitude for acting and disguise. In several stories ("The Sign of Four", "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", "The Man with the Twisted Lip", "The Adventure of the Empty House" and "A Scandal in Bohemia"), to gather evidence undercover he uses disguises so convincing that Watson fails to recognise him. In others ("The Adventure of the Dying Detective" and "A Scandal in Bohemia"), Holmes feigns injury or illness to incriminate the guilty. In the latter story, Watson says, "The stage lost a fine actor ... when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Guy Mankowski has said of Holmes that his ability to change his appearance to blend into any situation "helped him personify the idea of the English eccentric chameleon, in a way that prefigured the likes of David Bowie."


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Until Watson's arrival at Baker Street, Holmes largely worked alone, only occasionally employing agents from the city's underclass. These agents included a variety of informants, such as Langdale Pike, a "human book of reference upon all matters of social scandal", and Shinwell Johnson, who acted as Holmes's "agent in the huge criminal underworld of London". The best known of Holmes's agents are a group of street children he called "the Baker Street Irregulars".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes and Watson often carry pistols with them to confront criminals—in Watson's case, his old service weapon (probably a Mark III Adams revolver, issued to British troops during the 1870s). Holmes and Watson shoot the eponymous hound in "The Hound of the Baskervilles", and in "The Adventure of the Empty House" Watson pistol-whips Colonel Sebastian Moran. In "The Problem of Thor Bridge", Holmes uses Watson's revolver to solve the case through an experiment.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: As a gentleman, Holmes often carries a stick or cane. He is described by Watson as an expert at singlestick, and uses his cane twice as a weapon. In "A Study in Scarlet", Watson describes Holmes as an expert swordsman, and in "The "Gloria Scott"" the detective says he practised fencing while at university. In several stories ("A Case of Identity", "The Red-Headed League", "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons") Holmes wields a riding crop, described in the latter story as his "favourite weapon".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The detective is described (or demonstrated) as possessing above-average physical strength. In "The Yellow Face", Holmes's chronicler says, "Few men were capable of greater muscular effort." In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", Dr. Roylott demonstrates his strength by bending a fire poker in half. Watson describes Holmes as laughing, "'if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.' As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again."


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes is an adept bare-knuckle fighter; "The "Gloria Scott" mentions that Holmes boxed while at university. In "The Sign of Four", he introduces himself to McMurdo, a prize fighter, as "the amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison's rooms on the night of your benefit four years back." McMurdo remembers: "Ah, you're one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high if you had joined the fancy." In "The Yellow Face", Watson says: "He was undoubtedly one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen". In "The Solitary Cyclist" Holmes visits a country pub to make enquiries regarding a certain Mr Woodley which resulted in violence. Mr Woodley, Holmes tells Watson,


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Another character subsequently refers to Mr Woodley as looking "much disfigured" as a result of his encounter with Holmes.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In "The Adventure of the Empty House", Holmes tells Watson that he used a Japanese martial art known as baritsu to fling Moriarty to his death in the Reichenbach Falls. "Baritsu" is Conan Doyle's version of bartitsu, which combines jujitsu with boxing and cane fencing.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The first two Sherlock Holmes stories, the novels "A Study in Scarlet" (1887) and "The Sign of the Four" (1890), were moderately well received, but Holmes first became very popular early in 1891 when the first six short stories featuring the character were published in "The Strand Magazine". Holmes became widely known in Britain and America. The character was so well known that in 1893 when Arthur Conan Doyle killed Holmes in the short story "The Final Problem", the strongly negative response from readers was unlike any previous public reaction to a fictional event. The "Strand" reportedly lost more than 20,000 subscribers as a result of Holmes's death. Public pressure eventually contributed to Conan Doyle writing another Holmes story in 1901 and resurrecting the character in a story published in 1903. In Japan, Sherlock Holmes (and Alice from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland") became immensely popular in the country in the 1890s as it was opening up to the West, and they are cited as two British fictional Victorians who left an enormous creative and cultural legacy there.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Many fans of Sherlock Holmes have written letters to Holmes's address, 221B Baker Street. Though the address 221B Baker Street did not exist when the stories were first published, letters began arriving to the large Abbey National building which first encompassed that address almost as soon as it was built in 1932. Fans continue to send letters to Sherlock Holmes; these letters are now delivered to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. Some of the people who have sent letters to 221B Baker Street believe Holmes is real. Members of the general public have also believed Holmes actually existed. In a 2008 survey of British teenagers, 58 percent of respondents believed that Sherlock Holmes was a real individual.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The Sherlock Holmes stories continue to be widely read. Holmes's continuing popularity has led to many reimaginings of the character in adaptations. "Guinness World Records", which awarded Sherlock Holmes the title for "most portrayed literary human character in film & TV" in 2012, released a statement saying that the title "reflects his enduring appeal and demonstrates that his detective talents are as compelling today as they were 125 years ago."


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The London Metropolitan Railway named one of its twenty electric locomotives deployed in the 1920s for Sherlock Holmes. He was the only fictional character so honoured, along with eminent Britons such as Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, and Florence Nightingale.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: A number of London streets are associated with Holmes. York Mews South, off Crawford Street, was renamed Sherlock Mews, and Watson's Mews is near Crawford Place. The Sherlock Holmes is a public house in Northumberland Street in London which contains a large collection of memorabilia related to Holmes, the original collection having been put together for display in Baker Street during the Festival of Britain in 1951.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In 2002, the Royal Society of Chemistry bestowed an honorary fellowship on Holmes for his use of forensic science and analytical chemistry in popular literature, making him (as of 2019) the only fictional character thus honoured. Holmes has been commemorated numerous times on a UK postage stamp issued by the Royal Mail, most recently in their August 2020 series to celebrate the "Sherlock" television series.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: There are multiple statues of Sherlock Holmes around the world. The first, sculpted by John Doubleday, was unveiled in Meiringen, Switzerland, in September 1988. The second was unveiled in October 1988 in Karuizawa, Japan, and was sculpted by Yoshinori Satoh. The third was installed in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1989, and was sculpted by Gerald Laing. In 1999, a statue of Sherlock Holmes in London, also by John Doubleday, was unveiled near the fictional detective's address, 221B Baker Street. In 2001, a sculpture of Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle by Irena Sedlecká was unveiled in a statue collection in Warwickshire, England. A sculpture depicting both Holmes and Watson was unveiled in 2007 in Moscow, Russia, based partially on Sidney Paget's illustrations and partially on the actors in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson". In 2015, a sculpture of Holmes by Jane DeDecker was installed in the police headquarters of Edmond, Oklahoma, United States. In 2019, a statue of Holmes was unveiled in Chester, Illinois, United States, as part of a series of statues honouring cartoonist E. C. Segar and his characters. The statue is titled "Sherlock & Segar", and the face of the statue was modelled on Segar.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In 1934, the Sherlock Holmes Society (in London) and the Baker Street Irregulars (in New York) were founded. The latter is still active. The Sherlock Holmes Society was dissolved later in the 1930s, but was succeeded by a society with a slightly different name, the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, which was founded in 1951 and remains active. These societies were followed by many more, first in the U.S. (where they are known as "scion societies"—offshoots—of the Baker Street Irregulars) and then in England and Denmark. There are at least 250 societies worldwide, including Australia, Canada (such as The Bootmakers of Toronto), India, and Japan. Fans tend to be called "Holmesians" in the U.K. and "Sherlockians" in the U.S., though recently "Sherlockian" has also come to refer to fans of the Benedict Cumberbatch-led BBC series regardless of location.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Although Holmes is not the original fictional detective, his name has become synonymous with the role. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories introduced multiple literary devices that have become major conventions in detective fiction, such as the companion character who is not as clever as the detective and has solutions explained to him (thus informing the reader as well), as with Dr. Watson in the Holmes stories. Other conventions introduced by Doyle include the arch-criminal who is too clever for the official police to defeat, like Holmes's adversary Professor Moriarty, and the use of forensic science to solve cases.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The Sherlock Holmes stories established crime fiction as a respectable genre popular with readers of all backgrounds, and Doyle's success inspired many contemporary detective stories. Holmes influenced the creation of other "eccentric gentleman detective" characters, like Agatha Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot, introduced in 1920. Holmes also inspired a number of anti-hero characters "almost as an antidote to the masterful detective", such as the gentleman thief characters A. J. Raffles (created by E. W. Hornung in 1898) and Arsène Lupin (created by Maurice Leblanc in 1905).


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" has become one of the most quoted and iconic aspects of the character. However, although Holmes often observes that his conclusions are "elementary", and occasionally calls Watson "my dear Watson", the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" is never uttered in any of the sixty stories by Conan Doyle. One of the nearest approximations of the phrase appears in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893) when Holmes explains a deduction: Excellent!' I cried. 'Elementary,' said he."


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: William Gillette is widely considered to have originated the phrase with the formulation, "Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow", allegedly in his 1899 play "Sherlock Holmes". However, the script was revised numerous times over the course of some three decades of revivals and publications, and the phrase is present in some versions of the script, but not others.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The exact phrase, as well as close variants, can be seen in newspaper and journal articles as early as 1909; there is some indication that it was clichéd even then. "Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary" appears in P. G. Wodehouse's novel "Psmith, Journalist" (serialised 1909–10). The phrase became familiar with the American public in part due to its use in The Rathbone-Bruce series of films from 1939 to 1946.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Conan Doyle's 56 short stories and four novels are known as the "canon" by Holmes aficionados. The Great Game (also known as the Holmesian Game, the Sherlockian Game, or simply the Game, also the Higher Criticism) applies the methods of literary and especially Biblical criticism to the canon, operating on the pretense that Holmes and Watson were real people and that Conan Doyle was not the author of the stories but Watson's literary agent. From this basis, it attempts to resolve or explain away contradictions in the canon—such as the location of Watson's war wound, described as being in his shoulder in "A Study in Scarlet" and in his leg in "The Sign of Four"—and clarify details about Holmes, Watson and their world, such as the exact dates of events in the stories, combining historical research with references from the stories to construct scholarly analyses.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: For example, one detail analyzed in the Game is Holmes's birth date. The chronology of the stories is notoriously difficult, with many stories lacking dates and many others containing contradictory ones. Christopher Morley and William Baring-Gould contend that the detective was born on 6 January 1854, the year being derived from the statement in "His Last Bow" that he was 60 years of age in 1914, while the precise day is derived from broader, non-canonical speculation. This is the date the Baker Street Irregulars work from, with their annual dinner being held each January. Laurie R. King instead argues that details in "The "Gloria Scott"" (a story with no precise internal date) indicate that Holmes finished his second (and final) year of university in 1880 or 1885. If he began university at age 17, his birth year could be as late as 1868.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: For the 1951 Festival of Britain, Holmes's living room was reconstructed as part of a Sherlock Holmes exhibition, with a collection of original material. After the festival, items were transferred to The Sherlock Holmes (a London pub) and the Conan Doyle collection housed in Lucens, Switzerland by the author's son, Adrian. Both exhibitions, each with a Baker Street sitting-room reconstruction, are open to the public.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In 1969, the Toronto Reference Library began a collection of materials related to Conan Doyle. Stored today in Room 221B, this vast collection is accessible to the public. Similarly, in 1974 the University of Minnesota founded a collection that is now "the world’s largest gathering of material related to Sherlock Holmes and his creator". Access is closed to the general public, but is occasionally open to tours.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In 1990, the Sherlock Holmes Museum opened on Baker Street in London, followed the next year by a museum in Meiringen (near the Reichenbach Falls) dedicated to the detective. A private Conan Doyle collection is a permanent exhibit at the Portsmouth City Museum, where the author lived and worked as a physician.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The Sherlock Holmes stories have been scrutinized by a few academics for themes of empire and colonialism.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Susan Cannon Harris claims that themes of contagion and containment are common in the Holmes series, including the metaphors of Eastern foreigners as the root cause of "infection" within and around Europe. Lauren Raheja, writing in the Marxist journal "Nature, Society, and Thought", claims that Doyle used these characteristics to paint eastern colonies in a negative light, through their continually being the source of threats. For example, in one story Doyle makes mention of the Sumatran cannibals (also known as Batak) who throw poisonous darts, in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" a character employs a deadly West African poison, and in "The Speckled Band" a "long residence in the tropics" was a negative influence on one antagonist's bad temper. Yumna Siddiqi argues that Doyle depicted returned colonials as "marginal, physically ravaged characters that threaten the peace," while putting non-colonials in a much more positive light.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The popularity of Sherlock Holmes has meant that many writers other than Arthur Conan Doyle have created tales of the detective in a wide variety of different media, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original characters, stories, and setting. The first known period pastiche dates from 1891. Titled "The Late Sherlock Holmes", it was written by Conan Doyle's close friend, J. M. Barrie.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Adaptations have seen the character taken in radically different directions or placed in different times or even universes. For example, Holmes falls in love and marries in Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series, is re-animated after his death to fight future crime in the animated series "Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century", and is meshed with the setting of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" (which won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story). An especially influential pastiche was Nicholas Meyer's "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution", a 1974 "New York Times" bestselling novel (made into the 1976 film of the same name) in which Holmes's cocaine addiction has progressed to the point of endangering his career. It served to popularize the trend of incorporating clearly identified and contemporaneous historical figures (such as Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Sigmund Freud, or Jack the Ripper) into Holmesian pastiches, something Conan Doyle himself never did. Another common pastiche approach is to create a new story fully detailing an otherwise-passing canonical reference (such as an aside by Conan Doyle mentioning the "giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared" in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire").


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In addition to the Holmes canon, Conan Doyle's 1898 "The Lost Special" features an unnamed "amateur reasoner" intended to be identified as Holmes by his readers. The author's explanation of a baffling disappearance argued in Holmesian style poked fun at his own creation. Similar Conan Doyle short stories are "The Field Bazaar", "The Man with the Watches", and 1924's "How Watson Learned the Trick", a parody of the Watson–Holmes breakfast-table scenes. The author wrote other material featuring Holmes, especially plays: 1899's "Sherlock Holmes" (with William Gillette), 1910's "The Speckled Band", and 1921's "The Crown Diamond" (the basis for "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone"). These non-canonical works have been collected in several works released since Conan Doyle's death.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In terms of writers other than Conan Doyle, authors as diverse as Anthony Burgess, Neil Gaiman, Dorothy B. Hughes, Stephen King, Tanith Lee, A. A. Milne, and P. G. Wodehouse have all written Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Contemporary with Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc directly featured Holmes in his popular series about the gentleman thief, Arsène Lupin, though legal objections from Conan Doyle forced Leblanc to modify the name to "Herlock Sholmes" in reprints and later stories. Famed American mystery writer John Dickson Carr collaborated with Arthur Conan Doyle's son, Adrian Conan Doyle, on "The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes", a pastiche collection from 1954. In 2011, Anthony Horowitz published a Sherlock Holmes novel, "The House of Silk", presented as a continuation of Conan Doyle's work and with the approval of the Conan Doyle estate; a follow-up, "Moriarty", appeared in 2014. The "MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories" series of pastiches, edited by David Marcum and published by MX Publishing, has reached thirty volumes and features hundreds of stories echoing the original canon which were compiled for the restoration of Undershaw and the support of Stepping Stones School, now housed in it.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Some authors have written tales centred on characters from the canon other than Holmes. Anthologies edited by Michael Kurland and George Mann are entirely devoted to stories told from the perspective of characters other than Holmes and Watson. John Gardner, Michael Kurland, and Kim Newman, amongst many others, have all written tales in which Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty is the main character. Mycroft Holmes has been the subject of several efforts: "Enter the Lion" by Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright (1979), a four-book series by Quinn Fawcett, and 2015's "Mycroft Holmes", by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. M. J. Trow has written a series of seventeen books using Inspector Lestrade as the central character, beginning with "The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade" in 1985. Carole Nelson Douglas' Irene Adler series is based on "the woman" from "A Scandal in Bohemia", with the first book (1990's "Good Night, Mr. Holmes") retelling that story from Adler's point of view. Martin Davies has written three novels where Baker Street housekeeper Mrs. Hudson is the protagonist.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: In 1980's "The Name of the Rose", Italian author Umberto Eco creates a Sherlock Holmes of the 1320s in the form of a Franciscan friar and main protagonist named Brother William of Baskerville, his name a clear reference to Holmes per "The Hound of the Baskervilles". Brother William investigates a series of murders in the abbey alongside his novice Adso of Melk, who acts as his Dr. Watson. Furthermore, Umberto Eco's description of Brother William bears marked similarities in both physique and personality to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's description of Sherlock Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Laurie R. King recreated Holmes in her Mary Russell series (beginning with 1994's "The Beekeeper's Apprentice"), set during the First World War and the 1920s. Her Holmes, semi-retired in Sussex, is stumbled upon by a teenaged American girl. Recognising a kindred spirit, he trains her as his apprentice and subsequently marries her. As of 2021, the series includes seventeen base novels and additional writings.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: "The Final Solution", a 2004 novella by Michael Chabon, concerns an unnamed but long-retired detective interested in beekeeping who tackles the case of a missing parrot belonging to a Jewish refugee boy. Mitch Cullin's novel "A Slight Trick of the Mind" (2005) takes place two years after the end of the Second World War, and explores an old and frail Sherlock Holmes (now 93) as he comes to terms with a life spent in emotionless logic; this was also adapted into a film, 2015's "Mr. Holmes".


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: There have been many scholarly works dealing with Sherlock Holmes, some working within the bounds of the Great Game, and some written from the perspective that Holmes is a fictional character. In particular, there have been three major annotated editions of the complete series. The first was William Baring-Gould's 1967 "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes". This two-volume set was ordered to fit Baring-Gould's preferred chronology, and was written from a Great Game perspective. The second was 1993's "The Oxford Sherlock Holmes" (general editor: Owen Dudley Edwards), a nine-volume set written in a straight scholarly manner. The most recent is Leslie Klinger's "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" (2004–05), a three-volume set that returns to a Great Game perspective.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: "Guinness World Records" has listed Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history, with more than 75 actors playing the part in over 250 productions.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The 1899 play "Sherlock Holmes", by Conan Doyle and William Gillette, was a synthesis of several Conan Doyle stories. In addition to its popularity, the play is significant because it, rather than the original stories, introduced one of the key visual qualities commonly associated with Holmes today: his calabash pipe; the play also formed the basis for Gillette's 1916 film, "Sherlock Holmes". Gillette performed as Holmes some 1,300 times. In the early 1900s, H. A. Saintsbury took over the role from Gillette for a tour of the play. Between this play and Conan Doyle's own stage adaptation of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", Saintsbury portrayed Holmes over 1,000 times.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: Holmes's first screen appearance was in the 1900 Mutoscope film, "Sherlock Holmes Baffled". From 1921 to 1923, Eille Norwood played Holmes in forty-seven silent films (45 shorts and two features), in a series of performances that Conan Doyle spoke highly of. 1929's "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" was the first sound title to feature Holmes. From 1939 to 1946, Basil Rathbone played Holmes and Nigel Bruce played Watson in fourteen U.S. films (two for 20th Century Fox and a dozen for Universal Pictures) and in "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" radio show. While the Fox films were period pieces, the Universal films abandoned Victorian Britain and moved to a then-contemporary setting in which Holmes occasionally battled Nazis.


title: Sherlock Holmes

text: The character has also enjoyed numerous radio adaptations, beginning with Edith Meiser's "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", which ran from 1930 to 1936. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce continued with their roles for most of the run of "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", airing from 1939 to 1950. Bert Coules, having dramatised the entire Holmes canon for BBC Radio Four from 1989 to 1998, penned "The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" between 2002 and 2010. This pastiche series also aired on Radio Four, and starred Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams and then Andrew Sachs as Watson.