title: Moon River

text: There was an eruption of behind-the-scenes consternation when a Paramount Pictures executive, Martin Rackin, suggested removing the song from the film after a tepid Los Angeles preview. Hepburn's reaction was described by Mancini and others in degrees varying from her saying, "Over my dead body!" to her using more colorful language to make the same point.


title: Moon River

text: An was recorded by Mancini and his orchestra and chorus (without Hepburn's vocal) on December 8, 1960. It was released as a single in 1961 and became a number 11 hit in December of that year. Due to unpublished charts in "Billboard", Joel Whitburn's "Top Adult (Contemporary) Songs" variously reported the song as a number 3 or number 1 easy listening hit. Mancini's original version was also featured in the film "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989). In 1993, following Hepburn's death, her version was released on an album titled "Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn". In 2004, Hepburn's version finished at number 4 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema.


title: Moon River

text: "Moon River" was a hit single for Jerry Butler in late 1961. Released simultaneously with Mancini's, it reached number 11 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart and number 3 Easy Listening in December, two weeks before Mancini's recording reached the same chart ranking. British singer Danny Williams had a hit version of the song that reached number one in the UK in the final week of 1961. Although Andy Williams never released the song as a single, his LP "Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes" (1962), was certified gold in 1963 for selling one million units. The album reached number 3 on the "Billboard" Top 200, eventually selling more than two million copies by 1967. In 2002, a 74-year-old Andy Williams sang the song at the conclusion of the live NBC special telecast celebrating the network's 75th anniversary.


title: Moon River

text: In 2022, Andy Williams' recording of the song was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry.


title: Moon River

text: Hundreds of versions of the song have been recorded and it has been featured in many media. Mercer recorded the song in 1974 for his album "My Huckleberry Friend". In 2007, saxophonist Dave Koz recorded a version from his standards music album, "At the Movies", sung by Barry Manilow. In 2013, Neil Finn and Paul Kelly performed the song on their Goin' Your Way Tour, during which their performance at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall was recorded for the live album, "Goin' Your Way", released the same year. The title of the album comes from a phrase in the song's chorus: "Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way". Lawrence Welk's 1961 instrumental version was featured in "Mad Men" season 6, episode 13, "In Care Of" (2013). A version of the song was featured in Asif Kapadia's documentary film, "Amy" (2015), about Amy Winehouse. Winehouse's version, sung at age 16 with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra in 2000, is the opening song in the film.


title: Moon River

text: "The Telegraph" listed, among prominent covers of the song, those by Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Brightman and Chevy Chase. Other stars who have covered the song include Rod Stewart in "Fly Me to the Moon... The Great American Songbook Volume V" (2010), which charted at No. 4 on the "Billboard" 200, Barbra Streisand in "The Movie Album" (2003), a Grammy-nominated gold album, and Frank Ocean, who released a cover on Valentine's Day 2018 that debuted in the Top 10 of the "Billboard" Hot R&B chart. Diffuser.fm named these the "Top 5 Alt-Rock" versions of the song: Morrissey, Glasvegas, R.E.M., The Killers and Josh Ritter. Jacob Collier's "a capella" cover won the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella.


title: Alkane

text: In organic chemistry, an alkane, or paraffin (a historical trivial name that also has other meanings), is an acyclic saturated hydrocarbon. In other words, an alkane consists of hydrogen and carbon atoms arranged in a tree structure in which all the carbon–carbon bonds are single. Alkanes have the general chemical formula . The alkanes range in complexity from the simplest case of methane (), where "n" = 1 (sometimes called the parent molecule), to arbitrarily large and complex molecules, like pentacontane () or 6-ethyl-2-methyl-5-(1-methylethyl) octane, an isomer of tetradecane ().


title: Alkane

text: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) defines alkanes as "acyclic branched or unbranched hydrocarbons having the general formula , and therefore consisting entirely of hydrogen atoms and saturated carbon atoms". However, some sources use the term to denote "any" saturated hydrocarbon, including those that are either monocyclic (i.e. the cycloalkanes) or polycyclic, despite their having a distinct general formula (i.e. cycloalkanes are ).


title: Alkane

text: In an alkane, each carbon atom is sp-hybridized with 4 sigma bonds (either C–C or C–H), and each hydrogen atom is joined to one of the carbon atoms (in a C–H bond). The longest series of linked carbon atoms in a molecule is known as its carbon skeleton or carbon backbone. The number of carbon atoms may be considered as the size of the alkane.


title: Alkane

text: One group of the higher alkanes are waxes, solids at standard ambient temperature and pressure (SATP), for which the number of carbon atoms in the carbon backbone is greater than about 17.


title: Alkane

text: With their repeated – units, the alkanes constitute a homologous series of organic compounds in which the members differ in molecular mass by multiples of 14.03 u (the total mass of each such methylene-bridge unit, which comprises a single carbon atom of mass 12.01 u and two hydrogen atoms of mass ~1.01 u each).


title: Alkane

text: Methane is produced by methanogenic bacteria and some long-chain alkanes function as pheromones in certain animal species or as protective waxes in plants and fungi. Nevertheless, most alkanes do not have much biological activity. They can be viewed as molecular trees upon which can be hung the more active/reactive functional groups of biological molecules.


title: Alkane

text: An alkyl group is an alkane-based molecular fragment that bears one open valence for bonding. They are generally abbreviated with the symbol for any organyl group, R, although Alk is sometimes used to specifically symbolize an alkyl group (as opposed to an alkenyl group or aryl group).


title: Alkane

text: Saturated hydrocarbons can be linear, branched, or cyclic. The third group is sometimes called cycloalkanes. Very complicated structures are possible by combining linear, branch, cyclic alkanes.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes with more than three carbon atoms can be arranged in various ways, forming structural isomers. The simplest isomer of an alkane is the one in which the carbon atoms are arranged in a single chain with no branches. This isomer is sometimes called the "n"-isomer ("n" for "normal", although it is not necessarily the most common). However, the chain of carbon atoms may also be branched at one or more points. The number of possible isomers increases rapidly with the number of carbon atoms. For example, for acyclic alkanes:


title: Alkane

text: Branched alkanes can be chiral. For example, 3-methylhexane and its higher homologues are chiral due to their stereogenic center at carbon atom number 3. The above list only includes differences of connectivity, not stereochemistry. In addition to the alkane isomers, the chain of carbon atoms may form one or more rings. Such compounds are called cycloalkanes, and are also excluded from the above list because changing the number of rings changes the molecular formula. For example, cyclobutane and methylcyclopropane are isomers of each other (CH), but are not isomers of butane (CH).


title: Alkane

text: The IUPAC nomenclature (systematic way of naming compounds) for alkanes is based on identifying hydrocarbon chains. Unbranched, saturated hydrocarbon chains are named systematically with a Greek numerical prefix denoting the number of carbons and the suffix "-ane".


title: Alkane

text: In 1866, August Wilhelm von Hofmann suggested systematizing nomenclature by using the whole sequence of vowels a, e, i, o and u to create suffixes -ane, -ene, -ine (or -yne), -one, -une, for the hydrocarbons CH, CH, CH, CH, CH. In modern nomenclature, the first three specifically name hydrocarbons with single, double and triple bonds; while "-one" now represents a ketone.


title: Alkane

text: Straight-chain alkanes are sometimes indicated by the prefix "n-" or ""n"-"(for "normal") where a non-linear isomer exists. Although this is not strictly necessary and is not part of the IUPAC naming system, the usage is still common in cases where one wishes to emphasize or distinguish between the straight-chain and branched-chain isomers, e.g., ""n"-butane" rather than simply "butane" to differentiate it from isobutane. Alternative names for this group used in the petroleum industry are linear paraffins or "n"-paraffins.


title: Alkane

text: The first four names were derived from methanol, ether, propionic acid and butyric acid. Alkanes with five or more carbon atoms are named by adding the suffix -ane to the appropriate numerical multiplier prefix with elision of any terminal vowel ("-a" or "-o") from the basic numerical term. Hence, pentane, CH; hexane, CH; heptane, CH; octane, CH; etc. The numeral prefix is generally Greek; however, alkanes with a carbon atom count ending in nine, for example nonane, use the Latin prefix non-. For a more complete list, see list of straight-chain alkanes.


title: Alkane

text: Simple branched alkanes often have a common name using a prefix to distinguish them from linear alkanes, for example "n"-pentane, isopentane, and neopentane.


title: Alkane

text: Though technically distinct from the alkanes, this class of hydrocarbons is referred to by some as the "cyclic alkanes." As their description implies, they contain one or more rings.


title: Alkane

text: Simple cycloalkanes have a prefix "cyclo-" to distinguish them from alkanes. Cycloalkanes are named as per their acyclic counterparts with respect to the number of carbon atoms in their backbones, e.g., cyclopentane (CH) is a cycloalkane with 5 carbon atoms just like pentane (CH), but they are joined up in a five-membered ring. In a similar manner, propane and cyclopropane, butane and cyclobutane, etc.


title: Alkane

text: Substituted cycloalkanes are named similarly to substituted alkanes – the cycloalkane ring is stated, and the substituents are according to their position on the ring, with the numbering decided by the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog priority rules.


title: Alkane

text: The trivial (non-systematic) name for alkanes is 'paraffins'. Together, alkanes are known as the 'paraffin series'. Trivial names for compounds are usually historical artifacts. They were coined before the development of systematic names, and have been retained due to familiar usage in industry. Cycloalkanes are also called naphthenes.


title: Alkane

text: Branched-chain alkanes are called isoparaffins. "Paraffin" is a general term and often does not distinguish between pure compounds and mixtures of isomers, i.e., compounds of the same chemical formula, e.g., pentane and isopentane.


title: Alkane

text: All alkanes are colorless. Alkanes with the lowest molecular weights are gases, those of intermediate molecular weight are liquids, and the heaviest are waxy solids.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes experience intermolecular van der Waals forces. Stronger intermolecular van der Waals forces give rise to greater boiling points of alkanes.


title: Alkane

text: Under standard conditions, from CH to CH alkanes are gaseous; from CH to CH they are liquids; and after CH they are solids. As the boiling point of alkanes is primarily determined by weight, it should not be a surprise that the boiling point has an almost linear relationship with the size (molecular weight) of the molecule. As a rule of thumb, the boiling point rises 20–30 °C for each carbon added to the chain; this rule applies to other homologous series.


title: Alkane

text: A straight-chain alkane will have a boiling point higher than a branched-chain alkane due to the greater surface area in contact, and thus greater van der Waals forces, between adjacent molecules. For example, compare isobutane (2-methylpropane) and n-butane (butane), which boil at −12 and 0 °C, and 2,2-dimethylbutane and 2,3-dimethylbutane which boil at 50 and 58 °C, respectively.


title: Alkane

text: On the other hand, cycloalkanes tend to have higher boiling points than their linear counterparts due to the locked conformations of the molecules, which give a plane of intermolecular contact.


title: Alkane

text: The melting points of the alkanes follow a similar trend to boiling points for the same reason as outlined above. That is, (all other things being equal) the larger the molecule the higher the melting point. There is one significant difference between boiling points and melting points. Solids have a more rigid and fixed structure than liquids. This rigid structure requires energy to break down. Thus the better put together solid structures will require more energy to break apart. For alkanes, this can be seen from the graph above (i.e., the blue line). The odd-numbered alkanes have a lower trend in melting points than even-numbered alkanes. This is because even-numbered alkanes pack well in the solid phase, forming a well-organized structure which requires more energy to break apart. The odd-numbered alkanes pack less well and so the "looser"-organized solid packing structure requires less energy to break apart. For a visualization of the crystal structures see.


title: Alkane

text: The melting points of branched-chain alkanes can be either higher or lower than those of the corresponding straight-chain alkanes, again depending on the ability of the alkane in question to pack well in the solid phase.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes do not conduct electricity in any way, nor are they substantially polarized by an electric field. For this reason, they do not form hydrogen bonds and are insoluble in polar solvents such as water. Since the hydrogen bonds between individual water molecules are aligned away from an alkane molecule, the coexistence of an alkane and water leads to an increase in molecular order (a reduction in entropy). As there is no significant bonding between water molecules and alkane molecules, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that this reduction in entropy should be minimized by minimizing the contact between alkane and water: Alkanes are said to be hydrophobic as they are insoluble in water.


title: Alkane

text: Their solubility in nonpolar solvents is relatively high, a property that is called lipophilicity. Alkanes are, for example, miscible in all proportions among themselves.


title: Alkane

text: The density of the alkanes usually increases with the number of carbon atoms but remains less than that of water. Hence, alkanes form the upper layer in an alkane–water mixture.


title: Alkane

text: The molecular structure of the alkanes directly affects their physical and chemical characteristics. It is derived from the electron configuration of carbon, which has four valence electrons. The carbon atoms in alkanes are described as sp hybrids; that is to say that, to a good approximation, the valence electrons are in orbitals directed towards the corners of a tetrahedron which are derived from the combination of the 2s orbital and the three 2p orbitals. Geometrically, the angle between the bonds are cos(−) ≈ 109.47°. This is exact for the case of methane, while larger alkanes containing a combination of C–H and C–C bonds generally have bonds that are within several degrees of this idealized value.


title: Alkane

text: An alkane has only C–H and C–C single bonds. The former result from the overlap of an sp orbital of carbon with the 1s orbital of a hydrogen; the latter by the overlap of two sp orbitals on adjacent carbon atoms. The bond lengths amount to 1.09 × 10 m for a C–H bond and 1.54 × 10 m for a C–C bond.


title: Alkane

text: The spatial arrangement of the bonds is similar to that of the four sp orbitals—they are tetrahedrally arranged, with an angle of 109.47° between them. Structural formulae that represent the bonds as being at right angles to one another, while both common and useful, do not accurately depict the geometry.


title: Alkane

text: The structural formula and the bond angles are not usually sufficient to completely describe the geometry of a molecule. There is a further degree of freedom for each carbon–carbon bond: the torsion angle between the atoms or groups bound to the atoms at each end of the bond. The spatial arrangement described by the torsion angles of the molecule is known as its conformation.


title: Alkane

text: Ethane forms the simplest case for studying the conformation of alkanes, as there is only one C–C bond. If one looks down the axis of the C–C bond, one will see the so-called Newman projection. The hydrogen atoms on both the front and rear carbon atoms have an angle of 120° between them, resulting from the projection of the base of the tetrahedron onto a flat plane. However, the torsion angle between a given hydrogen atom attached to the front carbon and a given hydrogen atom attached to the rear carbon can vary freely between 0° and 360°. This is a consequence of the free rotation about a carbon–carbon single bond. Despite this apparent freedom, only two limiting conformations are important: eclipsed conformation and staggered conformation.


title: Alkane

text: The two conformations differ in energy: the staggered conformation is 12.6 kJ/mol (3.0 kcal/mol) lower in energy (more stable) than the eclipsed conformation (the least stable).


title: Alkane

text: This difference in energy between the two conformations, known as the torsion energy, is low compared to the thermal energy of an ethane molecule at ambient temperature. There is constant rotation about the C–C bond. The time taken for an ethane molecule to pass from one staggered conformation to the next, equivalent to the rotation of one CH group by 120° relative to the other, is of the order of 10 seconds.


title: Alkane

text: The case of higher alkanes is more complex but based on similar principles, with the antiperiplanar conformation always being the most favored around each carbon–carbon bond. For this reason, alkanes are usually shown in a zigzag arrangement in diagrams or in models. The actual structure will always differ somewhat from these idealized forms, as the differences in energy between the conformations are small compared to the thermal energy of the molecules: Alkane molecules have no fixed structural form, whatever the models may suggest.


title: Alkane

text: Virtually all organic compounds contain carbon–carbon and carbon–hydrogen bonds, and so show some of the features of alkanes in their spectra. Alkanes are notable for having no other groups, and therefore for the "absence" of other characteristic spectroscopic features of a functional group like –OH, –CHO, –COOH, etc.


title: Alkane

text: The carbon–hydrogen stretching mode gives a strong absorption between 2850 and 2960 cm, while the carbon–carbon stretching mode absorbs between 800 and 1300 cm. The carbon–hydrogen bending modes depend on the nature of the group: methyl groups show bands at 1450 cm and 1375 cm, while methylene groups show bands at 1465 cm and 1450 cm. Carbon chains with more than four carbon atoms show a weak absorption at around 725 cm.


title: Alkane

text: The proton resonances of alkanes are usually found at "δ" = 0.5–1.5. The carbon-13 resonances depend on the number of hydrogen atoms attached to the carbon: "δ" = 8–30 (primary, methyl, –CH), 15–55 (secondary, methylene, –CH–), 20–60 (tertiary, methyne, C–H) and quaternary. The carbon-13 resonance of quaternary carbon atoms is characteristically weak, due to the lack of nuclear Overhauser effect and the long relaxation time, and can be missed in weak samples, or samples that have not been run for a sufficiently long time.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes have a high ionization energy, and the molecular ion is usually weak. The fragmentation pattern can be difficult to interpret, but in the case of branched chain alkanes, the carbon chain is preferentially cleaved at tertiary or quaternary carbons due to the relative stability of the resulting free radicals. The fragment resulting from the loss of a single methyl group ("M" − 15) is often absent, and other fragments are often spaced by intervals of fourteen mass units, corresponding to sequential loss of CH groups.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes are only weakly reactive with most chemical compounds. The acid dissociation constant (p"K") values of all alkanes are estimated to range from 50 to 70, depending on the extrapolation method, hence they are extremely weak acids that are practically inert to bases (see: carbon acids). They are also extremely weak bases, undergoing no observable protonation in pure sulfuric acid ("H" ~ −12), although superacids that are at least millions of times stronger have been known to protonate them to give hypercoordinate alkanium ions (see: methanium ion). Similarly, they only show reactivity with the strongest of electrophilic reagents (e.g., dioxiranes and salts containing the NF cation). By virtue of their strong C–H bonds (~100 kcal/mol) and C–C bonds (~90 kcal/mol, but usually less sterically accessible), they are also relatively unreactive toward free radicals, although many electron-deficient radicals will react with alkanes in the absence of other electron-rich bonds (see below). This inertness is the source of the term "paraffins" (with the meaning here of "lacking affinity"). In crude oil the alkane molecules have remained chemically unchanged for millions of years.


title: Alkane

text: Free radicals, molecules with unpaired electrons, play a large role in most reactions of alkanes, such as cracking and reformation where long-chain alkanes are converted into shorter-chain alkanes and straight-chain alkanes into branched-chain isomers. Moreover, redox reactions of alkanes involving free radical intermediates, in particular with oxygen and the halogens, are possible as the carbon atoms are in a strongly reduced state; in the case of methane, carbon is in its lowest possible oxidation state (−4). Reaction with oxygen ("if" present in sufficient quantity to satisfy the reaction stoichiometry) leads to combustion without any smoke, producing carbon dioxide and water. Free radical halogenation reactions occur with halogens, leading to the production of haloalkanes. In addition, alkanes have been shown to interact with, and bind to, certain transition metal complexes in C–H bond activation reactions.


title: Alkane

text: In highly branched alkanes, the bond angle may differ significantly from the optimal value (109.5°) to accommodate bulky groups. Such distortions introduce a tension in the molecule, known as steric hindrance or strain. Strain substantially increases reactivity.


title: Alkane

text: However, in general and perhaps surprisingly, when branching is not extensive enough to make highly disfavorable 1,2- and 1,3-alkyl–alkyl steric interactions (worth ~3.1 kcal/mol and ~3.7 kcal/mol in the case of the eclipsing conformations of butane and pentane, respectively) unavoidable, the branched alkanes are actually more thermodynamically stable than their linear (or less branched) isomers. For example, the highly branched 2,2,3,3-tetramethylbutane is about 1.9 kcal/mol more stable than its linear isomer, "n"-octane. Due to the subtlety of this effect, the exact reasons for this rule have been vigorously debated in the chemical literature and is yet unsettled. Several explanations, including stabilization of branched alkanes by electron correlation, destabilization of linear alkanes by steric repulsion, stabilization by neutral hyperconjugation, and/or electrostatic effects have been advanced as possibilities. The controversy is related to the question of whether the traditional explanation of hyperconjugation is the primary factor governing the stability of alkyl radicals.


title: Alkane

text: All alkanes react with oxygen in a combustion reaction, although they become increasingly difficult to ignite as the number of carbon atoms increases. The general equation for complete combustion is:


title: Alkane

text: The standard enthalpy change of combustion, Δ"H", for alkanes increases by about 650 kJ/mol per CH group. Branched-chain alkanes have lower values of Δ"H" than straight-chain alkanes of the same number of carbon atoms, and so can be seen to be somewhat more stable.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes react with halogens in a so-called "free radical halogenation" reaction. The hydrogen atoms of the alkane are progressively replaced by halogen atoms. Free radicals are the reactive species that participate in the reaction, which usually leads to a mixture of products. The reaction is highly exothermic with halogen fluorine and can lead to an explosion.


title: Alkane

text: These reactions are an important industrial route to halogenated hydrocarbons. There are three steps:


title: Alkane

text: Experiments have shown that all halogenation produces a mixture of all possible isomers, indicating that all hydrogen atoms are susceptible to reaction. The mixture produced, however, is not a statistical mixture: Secondary and tertiary hydrogen atoms are preferentially replaced due to the greater stability of secondary and tertiary free-radicals. An example can be seen in the monobromination of propane:


title: Alkane

text: Cracking breaks larger molecules into smaller ones. This can be done with a thermal or catalytic method. The thermal cracking process follows a homolytic mechanism with formation of free radicals. The catalytic cracking process involves the presence of acid catalysts (usually solid acids such as silica-alumina and zeolites), which promote a heterolytic (asymmetric) breakage of bonds yielding pairs of ions of opposite charges, usually a carbocation and the very unstable hydride anion. Carbon-localized free radicals and cations are both highly unstable and undergo processes of chain rearrangement, C–C scission in position beta (i.e., cracking) and intra- and intermolecular hydrogen transfer or hydride transfer. In both types of processes, the corresponding reactive intermediates (radicals, ions) are permanently regenerated, and thus they proceed by a self-propagating chain mechanism. The chain of reactions is eventually terminated by radical or ion recombination.


title: Alkane

text: Dragan and his colleague were the first to report about isomerization in alkanes. Isomerization and reformation are processes in which straight-chain alkanes are heated in the presence of a platinum catalyst. In isomerization, the alkanes become branched-chain isomers. In other words, it does not lose any carbons or hydrogens, keeping the same molecular weight. In reformation, the alkanes become cycloalkanes or aromatic hydrocarbons, giving off hydrogen as a by-product. Both of these processes raise the octane number of the substance. Butane is the most common alkane that is put under the process of isomerization, as it makes many branched alkanes with high octane numbers.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes will react with steam in the presence of a nickel catalyst to give hydrogen. Alkanes can be chlorosulfonated and nitrated, although both reactions require special conditions. The fermentation of alkanes to carboxylic acids is of some technical importance. In the Reed reaction, sulfur dioxide, chlorine and light convert hydrocarbons to sulfonyl chlorides. Nucleophilic abstraction can be used to separate an alkane from a metal. Alkyl groups can be transferred from one compound to another by transmetalation reactions. A mixture of antimony pentafluoride (SbF) and fluorosulfonic acid (HSOF), called magic acid, can protonate alkanes.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes form a small portion of the atmospheres of the outer gas planets such as Jupiter (0.1% methane, 2 ppm ethane), Saturn (0.2% methane, 5 ppm ethane), Uranus (1.99% methane, 2.5 ppm ethane) and Neptune (1.5% methane, 1.5 ppm ethane). Titan (1.6% methane), a satellite of Saturn, was examined by the "Huygens" probe, which indicated that Titan's atmosphere periodically rains liquid methane onto the moon's surface. Also on Titan, the Cassini mission has imaged seasonal methane/ethane lakes near the polar regions of Titan. Methane and ethane have also been detected in the tail of the comet Hyakutake. Chemical analysis showed that the abundances of ethane and methane were roughly equal, which is thought to imply that its ices formed in interstellar space, away from the Sun, which would have evaporated these volatile molecules. Alkanes have also been detected in meteorites such as carbonaceous chondrites.


title: Alkane

text: Traces of methane gas (about 0.0002% or 1745 ppb) occur in the Earth's atmosphere, produced primarily by methanogenic microorganisms, such as Archaea in the gut of ruminants.


title: Alkane

text: The most important commercial sources for alkanes are natural gas and oil. Natural gas contains primarily methane and ethane, with some propane and butane: oil is a mixture of liquid alkanes and other hydrocarbons. These hydrocarbons were formed when marine animals and plants (zooplankton and phytoplankton) died and sank to the bottom of ancient seas and were covered with sediments in an anoxic environment and converted over many millions of years at high temperatures and high pressure to their current form. Natural gas resulted thereby for example from the following reaction:


title: Alkane

text: These hydrocarbon deposits, collected in porous rocks trapped beneath impermeable cap rocks, comprise commercial oil fields. They have formed over millions of years and once exhausted cannot be readily replaced. The depletion of these hydrocarbons reserves is the basis for what is known as the energy crisis.


title: Alkane

text: Methane is also present in what is called biogas, produced by animals and decaying matter, which is a possible renewable energy source.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes have a low solubility in water, so the content in the oceans is negligible; however, at high pressures and low temperatures (such as at the bottom of the oceans), methane can co-crystallize with water to form a solid methane clathrate (methane hydrate). Although this cannot be commercially exploited at the present time, the amount of combustible energy of the known methane clathrate fields exceeds the energy content of all the natural gas and oil deposits put together. Methane extracted from methane clathrate is, therefore, a candidate for future fuels.


title: Alkane

text: Certain types of bacteria can metabolize alkanes: they prefer even-numbered carbon chains as they are easier to degrade than odd-numbered chains.


title: Alkane

text: On the other hand, certain archaea, the methanogens, produce large quantities of methane by the metabolism of carbon dioxide or other oxidized organic compounds. The energy is released by the oxidation of hydrogen:


title: Alkane

text: Methanogens are also the producers of marsh gas in wetlands. The methane output of cattle and other herbivores, which can release 30 to 50 gallons per day, and of termites, is also due to methanogens. They also produce this simplest of all alkanes in the intestines of humans. Methanogenic archaea are, hence, at the end of the carbon cycle, with carbon being released back into the atmosphere after having been fixed by photosynthesis. It is probable that our current deposits of natural gas were formed in a similar way.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes also play a role, if a minor role, in the biology of the three eukaryotic groups of organisms: fungi, plants, and animals. Some specialized yeasts, e.g., "Candida tropicale", "Pichia" sp., "Rhodotorula" sp., can use alkanes as a source of carbon or energy. The fungus "Amorphotheca resinae" prefers the longer-chain alkanes in aviation fuel, and can cause serious problems for aircraft in tropical regions.


title: Alkane

text: In plants, the solid long-chain alkanes are found in the plant cuticle and epicuticular wax of many species, but are only rarely major constituents. They protect the plant against water loss, prevent the leaching of important minerals by the rain, and protect against bacteria, fungi, and harmful insects. The carbon chains in plant alkanes are usually odd-numbered, between 27 and 33 carbon atoms in length, and are made by the plants by decarboxylation of even-numbered fatty acids. The exact composition of the layer of wax is not only species-dependent but also changes with the season and such environmental factors as lighting conditions, temperature or humidity.


title: Alkane

text: More volatile short-chain alkanes are also produced by and found in plant tissues. The Jeffrey pine is noted for producing exceptionally high levels of "n"-heptane in its resin, for which reason its distillate was designated as the zero point for one octane rating. Floral scents have also long been known to contain volatile alkane components, and "n"-nonane is a significant component in the scent of some roses. Emission of gaseous and volatile alkanes such as ethane, pentane, and hexane by plants has also been documented at low levels, though they are not generally considered to be a major component of biogenic air pollution.


title: Alkane

text: Edible vegetable oils also typically contain small fractions of biogenic alkanes with a wide spectrum of carbon numbers, mainly 8 to 35, usually peaking in the low to upper 20s, with concentrations up to dozens of milligrams per kilogram (parts per million by weight) and sometimes over a hundred for the total alkane fraction.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes are found in animal products, although they are less important than unsaturated hydrocarbons. One example is the shark liver oil, which is approximately 14% pristane (2,6,10,14-tetramethylpentadecane, CH). They are important as pheromones, chemical messenger materials, on which insects depend for communication. In some species, e.g. the support beetle "Xylotrechus colonus", pentacosane (CH), 3-methylpentaicosane (CH) and 9-methylpentaicosane (CH) are transferred by body contact. With others like the tsetse fly "Glossina morsitans morsitans", the pheromone contains the four alkanes 2-methylheptadecane (CH), 17,21-dimethylheptatriacontane (CH), 15,19-dimethylheptatriacontane (CH) and 15,19,23-trimethylheptatriacontane (CH), and acts by smell over longer distances. Waggle-dancing honey bees produce and release two alkanes, tricosane and pentacosane.


title: Alkane

text: One example, in which both plant and animal alkanes play a role, is the ecological relationship between the sand bee ("Andrena nigroaenea") and the early spider orchid ("Ophrys sphegodes"); the latter is dependent for pollination on the former. Sand bees use pheromones in order to identify a mate; in the case of "A. nigroaenea", the females emit a mixture of tricosane (CH), pentacosane (CH) and heptacosane (CH) in the ratio 3:3:1, and males are attracted by specifically this odor. The orchid takes advantage of this mating arrangement to get the male bee to collect and disseminate its pollen; parts of its flower not only resemble the appearance of sand bees but also produce large quantities of the three alkanes in the same ratio as female sand bees. As a result, numerous males are lured to the blooms and attempt to copulate with their imaginary partner: although this endeavor is not crowned with success for the bee, it allows the orchid to transfer its pollen,


title: Alkane

text: As stated earlier, the most important source of alkanes is natural gas and crude oil. Alkanes are separated in an oil refinery by fractional distillation and processed into many products.


title: Alkane

text: The Fischer–Tropsch process is a method to synthesize liquid hydrocarbons, including alkanes, from carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This method is used to produce substitutes for petroleum distillates.


title: Alkane

text: There is usually little need for alkanes to be synthesized in the laboratory, since they are usually commercially available. Also, alkanes are generally unreactive chemically or biologically, and do not undergo functional group interconversions cleanly. When alkanes are produced in the laboratory, it is often a side-product of a reaction. For example, the use of "n"-butyllithium as a strong base gives the conjugate acid "n"-butane as a side-product:


title: Alkane

text: However, at times it may be desirable to make a section of a molecule into an alkane-like functionality (alkyl group) using the above or similar methods. For example, an ethyl group is an alkyl group; when this is attached to a hydroxy group, it gives ethanol, which is not an alkane. To do so, the best-known methods are hydrogenation of alkenes:


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes or alkyl groups can also be prepared directly from alkyl halides in the Corey–House–Posner–Whitesides reaction. The Barton–McCombie deoxygenation removes hydroxyl groups from alcohols e.g.


title: Alkane

text: and the Clemmensen reduction removes carbonyl groups from aldehydes and ketones to form alkanes or alkyl-substituted compounds e.g.:


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes can be prepared from a variety of organic compounds. These include alkenes, alkynes, haloalkanes, alcohols, aldehydes, ketones and carboxylic acids.


title: Alkane

text: Addition of molecular hydrogen across the π bond(s) of alkenes and alkynes gives alkanes. This hydrogenation reaction is typically performed using a powdered metal catalyst, such as palladium, platinum, or nickel. The reaction is exothermic because the product alkane is more stable. This is an important process in several fields of industrial and research chemistry.


title: Alkane

text: In the Wurtz reaction, a haloalkane is treated with sodium in dry ether to yield an alkane having double the number of carbon atoms. This reaction proceeds through a free radical intermediate and has the possibility of alkene formation in case of tertiary haloalkanes and vicinal dihalides.


title: Alkane

text: In Corey–House synthesis, a haloalkane is treated with dialkyl lithium cuprate, a Gilman reagent, to yield a higher alkane:


title: Alkane

text: Haloalkanes can be reduced to alkanes by reaction with hydride reagents such as lithium aluminium hydride.


title: Alkane

text: The applications of alkanes depend on the number of carbon atoms. The first four alkanes are used mainly for heating and cooking purposes, and in some countries for electricity generation. Methane and ethane are the main components of natural gas; they are normally stored as gases under pressure. It is, however, easier to transport them as liquids: This requires both compression and cooling of the gas.


title: Alkane

text: Propane and butane are gases at atmospheric pressure that can be liquefied at fairly low pressures and are commonly known as liquified petroleum gas (LPG). Propane is used in propane gas burners and as a fuel for road vehicles, butane in space heaters and disposable cigarette lighters. Both are used as propellants in aerosol sprays.


title: Alkane

text: From pentane to octane the alkanes are highly volatile liquids. They are used as fuels in internal combustion engines, as they vaporize easily on entry into the combustion chamber without forming droplets, which would impair the uniformity of the combustion. Branched-chain alkanes are preferred as they are much less prone to premature ignition, which causes knocking, than their straight-chain homologues. This propensity to premature ignition is measured by the octane rating of the fuel, where 2,2,4-trimethylpentane ("isooctane") has an arbitrary value of 100, and heptane has a value of zero. Apart from their use as fuels, the middle alkanes are also good solvents for nonpolar substances.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes from nonane to, for instance, hexadecane (an alkane with sixteen carbon atoms) are liquids of higher viscosity, less and less suitable for use in gasoline. They form instead the major part of diesel and aviation fuel. Diesel fuels are characterized by their cetane number, cetane being an old name for hexadecane. However, the higher melting points of these alkanes can cause problems at low temperatures and in polar regions, where the fuel becomes too thick to flow correctly.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes from hexadecane upwards form the most important components of fuel oil and lubricating oil. In the latter function, they work at the same time as anti-corrosive agents, as their hydrophobic nature means that water cannot reach the metal surface. Many solid alkanes find use as paraffin wax, for example, in candles. This should not be confused however with true wax, which consists primarily of esters.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes with a chain length of approximately 35 or more carbon atoms are found in bitumen, used, for example, in road surfacing. However, the higher alkanes have little value and are usually split into lower alkanes by cracking.


title: Alkane

text: Some synthetic polymers such as polyethylene and polypropylene are alkanes with chains containing hundreds or thousands of carbon atoms. These materials are used in innumerable applications, and billions of kilograms of these materials are made and used each year.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes are chemically very inert apolar molecules which are not very reactive as organic compounds. This inertness yields serious ecological issues if they are released into the environment. Due to their lack of functional groups and low water solubility, alkanes show poor bioavailability for microorganisms.


title: Alkane

text: There are, however, some microorganisms possessing the metabolic capacity to utilize "n"-alkanes as both carbon and energy sources. Some bacterial species are highly specialised in degrading alkanes; these are referred to as hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria.


title: Alkane

text: Methane is flammable, explosive and dangerous to inhale; because it is a colorless, odorless gas, special caution must be taken around methane. Ethane is also extremely flammable, explosive, and dangerous to inhale. Both of them may cause suffocation. Propane, too, is flammable and explosive, and may cause drowsiness or unconsciousness if inhaled. Butane presents the same hazards as propane.


title: Alkane

text: Alkanes also pose a threat to the environment. Branched alkanes have a lower biodegradability than unbranched alkanes. Methane is considered to be the greenhouse gas that is most dangerous to the environment, although the amount of methane in the atmosphere is relatively low.


title: Getafe CF

text: Getafe Club de Fútbol (), or simply Getafe, is a professional football club based in Getafe, a city in the Community of Madrid. The team competes in La Liga, the highest tier of the Spanish football system. The club's home stadium (owned and operated by the municipality) is Coliseum Alfonso Pérez which was opened in 1998 and can hold 17,393 spectators. The club was founded in 1946 and refounded in 1983.


title: Getafe CF

text: Since promoting to La Liga for the first time in 2004, Getafe participated in the top level of Spanish football for twelve years between 2004 and 2016, and again since 2017.


title: Getafe CF

text: The club's main rivalry is against neighbours Leganés, who are based near the town of Getafe, and a friendly rivalry against Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid.


title: Getafe CF

text: Sociedad Getafe Deportivo was founded in 1923, only playing in lower divisions from 1928 to 1932. After the Spanish Civil War, in 1945 five Getafe locals – Enrique Condes García, Aurelio Miranda Olavaria, Antonio Corridor Lozano, Manuel Serrano Vergara and Miguel Cubero Francés – while meeting at La Marquesina bar, decided to form a local team. Officially founded on 24 February 1946, the club was named Club Getafe Deportivo.


title: Getafe CF

text: The club originally played in the Campo del Regimiento de Artillería, which lacked goal posts. Shortly after, the club moved to San Isidro, housed in the current Municipal Sports Center of San Isidro. Here, Club Getafe was promoted to the third division following their victory against Villarrobledo in the 1956–57 season. Getafe was nearly promoted to the Segunda División in 1957–58, but was defeated by CA Almería.


title: Getafe CF

text: On 2 September 1970, the club inaugurated its own stadium after being promoted back to the Tercera División. Presided by chairman Francisco Vara, Las Margaritas won a 3–1 victory over Michelín. The team survived in the third level that season, and six years later gained their first promotion to the second division.


title: Getafe CF

text: Club Getafe Deportivo played six seasons in the Segunda División, with little success. From 1976 to 1982, they placed below tenth level all six years.


title: Getafe CF

text: In 1978, the club advanced to play against Barcelona in the Copa del Rey round of 16. Playing at home in the first leg, Getafe drew with a star-studded Barcelona team 3–3, before traveling away for the second leg and being thrashed 8–0 at the Camp Nou.


title: Getafe CF

text: At the conclusion of the 1981–82 season, players having not been paid, Getafe was automatically relegated and subsequently liquidated.


title: Getafe CF

text: Meanwhile, on 1 September 1976, a new club was founded in the National Sports Council and the Regional Federation of Castille. The club was called Peña Madridista Getafe (the "Real Madrid supporters' club of Getafe"). This club played for four seasons in various divisions, until taking the name Club Deportivo Peña Getafe, and played under this name for a further two seasons. On 10 July 1982, they joined forces with the much older Club Getafe Promesas, and were registered again in the Regional Federation of Castille.


title: Getafe CF

text: Based on the merger the previous year, the present Getafe Club de Fútbol was officially founded on 8 July 1983, after passing through assembly.


title: Getafe CF

text: Starting in the regional leagues in 1983–84, Getafe was promoted for four consecutive seasons until reaching the Segunda División B. The club started a new period with its promotion into Segunda in 1994–95, staying only two years. Threatening absolute disappearance just a few years later in 1997, Getafe survived relegation into the fourth level Tercera División following a two-legged playoff victory over Huesca.


title: Getafe CF

text: Returning to the second division for 1999–2000, Getafe lasted another two seasons. However, one year later, they would return following an amazing promotion in 2001–02 during which one of their players, Sebastián "Sebas" Gómez, was murdered, and controversy regarding unpaid payments of players following a debt of €3 million.


title: Getafe CF

text: Consolidating their position after one year, Getafe had a fantastic season in Segunda. At the top of the table for most of the year, the side travelled to the Canary Islands on the final matchday needing a win to assure a historic promotion to La Liga, the top-flight. Amazingly, they defeated Tenerife 5–3 with five goals from Sergio Pachón, thus becoming along with Real Madrid, Atlético Madrid and Rayo Vallecano the fourth team from the Community of Madrid – and the first of them from outside of the capital – to ever play in La Liga. With this promotion, Getafe had ascended the whole Spanish football pyramid, achieving this feat in only 20 years.


title: Getafe CF

text: The club started 2004–05 poorly, lying at the bottom of the table. Home wins over Espanyol, Athletic Bilbao, Valencia and Real Madrid, followed by a sole away win of the season over Athletic Bilbao, saw Getafe climb to finish 13th, being the only promoted side to avoid relegation. At the end of the season, the club lost head coach Quique Sánchez Flores and several players to rival clubs. In Getafe's next season, the club briefly topped the table before slipping to finish ninth. During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Argentine-born Mariano Pernía became Getafe's first ever Spanish international, before moving to Atlético Madrid.


title: Getafe CF

text: In 2006–07, Getafe again finished ninth in the league, conceding only 33 goals in 38 matches and goalkeeper Roberto Abbondanzieri was awarded the Zamora Trophy, having recorded 12 clean sheets. The highlight of the club's season was reaching the 2006–07 Copa del Rey final, a competition in which Getafe had never reached the quarter-finals before. The run included a two-legged semi-final against Barcelona in which Getafe lost the first leg 5–2 at the Camp Nou before producing a 4–0 rout in the second leg at the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez. Getafe lost their first ever major final 1–0 to Sevilla at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. Through this, the club qualified for the following season's UEFA Cup qualification, as Sevilla had already qualified for the UEFA Champions League through their league position.


title: Getafe CF

text: The following season, coach Bernd Schuster left after two seasons to become head coach at Real Madrid, and Getafe appointed Michael Laudrup as his replacement. Under Laudrup, Getafe again finished the league mid-table. In the UEFA Cup, the team managed to progress to the quarter-finals after finishing top of Group G, only losing once, setting up a tie against four-time European Cup winners Bayern Munich. Getafe drew the away leg 1–1, thanks to an injury time equaliser from Cosmin Contra. In the second leg, Rubén de la Red was sent off after six minutes. Contra put Getafe ahead just before half-time, but in the 89th minute, Franck Ribéry equalized to send the match into extra time. Two quick goals from Javier Casquero and substitute Braulio gave Getafe a 3–1 lead, but Bayern pulled a goal back from Luca Toni, before Toni again scored seconds before the end of extra time, giving Bayern an away goals win. Getafe also had successful run in the Copa del Rey, reaching the final for a second year running. In the final, at the Vicente Calderón Stadium, Getafe were beaten 3–1 by Valencia.


title: Getafe CF

text: In the 2015–16 season, Getafe were relegated to second division after spending 12 years in first campaign. However, in 2016–17, the club immediately returned to La Liga after defeating Huesca and Tenerife to gain promotion via the play-offs. In the 2017–18 season Getafe finished in the 8th position, easily avoiding the relegation back to Segunda División.


title: Getafe CF

text: In the 2018–19 season Getafe finished 5th, their highest finish in the first division, and qualified for the 2019–20 UEFA Europa League group stage. They finished 2nd in their group, with 12 points from 6 games, which allowed them to advance to the next round. They managed to beat Ajax 3–2 on aggregate in the Round of 32. Due to that win, they faced Inter Milan in the round of 16, where their European dream ended with a 2–0 loss.


title: Getafe CF

text: Getafe play at the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez, located in Getafe. Its pitch dimensions are 105x70 metres. The stadium was inaugurated on 1 January 1998, named after the Spanish international (and of Real Madrid fame) Alfonso Pérez. Though he never played for or against Getafe, or even in the stadium, he is perhaps the most famous footballer to come out of the area and was at the height of his career during the mid-1990s.


title: Getafe CF

text: Before playing in the Coliseum, Getafe played their home matches at the nearby Estadio de las Margaritas, part of the greater Sports City of Las Margaritas. The Coliseum was subsequently built as a natural extension to the much smaller facilities at Las Margaritas. Since its foundation, the stadium has had numerous renovations, and now seats 14,400 people and several thousand more standing. As such, the exact capacity is variable and ambiguous. Getafe generally fill the stadium for local matches against Real and Atlético Madrid, as well as against Barcelona, most famously in the 2006–07 Cup semi-final. For the first time in their history, Getafe pre-sold out the whole of the Coliseum before their second leg match against Bayern Munich in the UEFA Cup quarter-final.


title: Getafe CF

text: Getafe club president Ángel Torres expressed interest in upgrading the Coliseum to a much greater 20,000 seat arena, in conjunction with Madrid's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. The failure of this bid and poor crowd averages put this redevelopment in doubt.


title: Getafe CF

text: Getafe use the nearby Sports City when training. These facilities include several training pitches with both grass and artificial turf, full medical rooms and recuperation facilities.


title: Getafe CF

text: Commonly called "Marea Azul", or "Azulones", Getafe supporters have steadily increased in number with the success of the team in recent years. There are 18 "peñas" ("supporter clubs") and 12,000 "socios" ("associates"). Former Real Madrid player Francisco Pavón is a well-known Getafe "socio", while Fernando Alonso and Rafael Nadal have attended matches at the Coliseum in the past.


title: Getafe CF

text: Getafe supporters have grown far beyond the local area and are now known to have fans in Australia, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Argentina, Scotland, Denmark, the United States and Mexico. In 2007, a "peña" was founded in Venezuela to extend the worldwide club reach.


title: Getafe CF

text: Getafe also created some controversy in 2007 when their season ticket campaign included biblical references of Abraham, Moses and Jesus sacrificing themselves for the team. The club responded by withdrawing the first scene involving Abraham.


title: Getafe CF

text: Upon important or famous victories, Getafe fans congregate to celebrate at the Cibelina statue in the town centre. Prior to the 2007 Cup final, Torres implored the fans to "tear down the Cibelina" upon victory, promising to pay for a new design. During that final, thousands of supporters rushed to get tickets and packed into the Santiago Bernabéu, yet were vastly outnumbered by "Sevillistas". However, those who failed to get tickets – most of which went to season ticket holders for the 2007–08 campaign – were able to watch the match on a big screen in Getafe's central square.


title: Getafe CF

text: In 2011, Getafe released a humorous tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign, pretending to decry the club's relatively small fanbase and encouraging male supporters to donate sperm in order to breed more fans. To inspire those donations, the club produced a short pornographic film called ""Zombies Calientes de Getafe"" (Horny Zombies of Getafe), "shot in the style of a 1970s porn film", and delivered it to sperm donation clinics in Madrid.


title: Getafe CF

text: Historically, due to their close geographical position, Getafe has always held a strong rivalry with Leganés. They played out numerous encounters in the lower division before the two teams fortunes began to contrast as Getafe gained ascendency and Leganés began to deteriorate.


title: Getafe CF

text: In the first division, the side has held some exciting matches in the last few years with Real Madrid, with the ledger being most recently squared at three wins each. Real Madrid's much greater stature, huge budget and expensive squad has never stopped Getafe from rising to the challenge and often playing their best football against their "bigger brother".


title: Getafe CF

text: In addition to this, Getafe has developed somewhat of a rivalry with Barcelona, which culminated in their famous 4–0 victory over their more fancied opponents during the 2006–07 Copa del Rey semi-final. Also, Valencia has succumbed numerous times to "el Geta", often quite heavily, as was the case during the 2006–07 Copa del Rey, which ensured Getafe's first ever appearance in the Copa's quarter-finals with a 2–4 win at Valencia's Mestalla Stadium. However, this result was turned around in the 2008 Copa del Rey final, as Valencia would deny Getafe their first ever trophy with a 3–1 victory. This rivalry is propped up healthily by the regular transfer of Getafe players (and head coach Quique Sánchez Flores) to Valencia.


title: Getafe CF

text: The club has not appeared in any European competition except in the UEFA Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup).


title: Getafe CF

text: The club appeared only three times in this tournament, In 2007–08 they qualified for the tournament as Copa del Rey runner-up in the previous season's for Sevilla, who qualified for the UEFA Champions League, and progressed from the group and round of 16 before being beaten by Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals. three years later, in 2010–11 they were paired with APOEL in the playoff round, and qualified by eliminating them, but then they were eliminated from the group stage as third place.


title: Getafe CF

text: In the 2019–20 season, Getafe appeared in the tournament for the third time, and they were able to qualify from the group stage in second place, and they also managed to pass the round of 16 after eliminating Ajax, but they were eliminated in the next round against Inter Milan in one match due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The Swedish Social Democratic Party, formally the Swedish Social Democratic Workers' Party ( ; S/SAP), usually referred to as The Social Democrats ( ), is a social-democratic political party in Sweden. Founded in 1889, the SAP is the country's oldest and currently largest party.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: From the mid-1930s to the 1980s, the Social Democratic Party won more than 40% of the vote. From 1932 to 1976, the SAP was continuously in government. Most recently, the party was heading the government from 2014 to 2022. It participates in elections as "The Workers' Party – The Social Democrats" ( ).


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Founded in 1889 as a member of the Second International, a split occurred in 1917 when the left socialists split from the Social Democrats to form the Swedish Social Democratic Left Party (later the Communist Party of Sweden and now the Left Party). The symbol of the SAP is traditionally a red rose which is believed to have been Fredrik Ström's idea. The words of honour as recorded by the 2001 party programme are "freedom, equality, and solidarity". The party had influences from Marxism in its early days, but these were gradually removed in the years leading up to the split in 1917. Between 1923 and 1940, the party was a member of the Labour and Socialist International.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Swedish social democracy rose due to the extension of suffrage to the working class and the organizing of trade unions and other civic associations. Unlike in many other European countries, the Swedish socialist left was able to form a stable majority coalition during the early 20th century. Early on, in large part due to the leadership of Hjalmar Branting, the Swedish socialists adopted a flexible and pragmatic understanding of Marxism. They were also willing to form cross-class coalitions with liberals and farmers. Political scientist Sheri Berman also credits the Swedish Social Democratic success during the interwar years to the party's adoption of Keynesianism during the Great Depression (which she contrasts with the Social Democratic Party of Germany's reluctance towards Keynesian policies during the same time and the German Social Democrats' subsequent decline).


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In 2007, the Social Democrats elected Mona Sahlin as its first female party leader. On 7 December 2009, the Social Democrats launched a political and electoral coalition with the Greens and the Left Party known as the Red–Greens. The parties contested the 2010 election on a joint manifesto, but lost the election to the incumbent centre-right coalition The Alliance. On 26 November 2010, the Red–Green alliance was dissolved. The party is a member of the Progressive Alliance, the Party of European Socialists and SAMAK. The party was a member of the Socialist International until March 2017.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Currently, the SAP has about 100,000 members, with about 2,540 local party associations and 500 workplace associations. It has been the largest party in the Riksdag since 1914. The member base is diverse, but it prominently features organized blue-collar workers and public sector employees. The party has a close, historical relationship with the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO). As a corporatist organ, it has also formed policy in compromise mediation with employers' associations (primarily the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and its predecessors) as well as trade unions.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The SAP had its golden age during the mid-1930s to mid-1980s when in half of all general elections it received between 44.6% and 46.2% (averaging 45.3%) of the votes, making it one of the most successful parties in the history of the liberal-democratic world.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In two of the general elections in 1940 and 1968, it got more than 50% of the votes, although both cases had special circumstances. In 1940, all established Swedish parties, except for the Communist Party of Sweden (SKP), participated in a coalition government due to the pressures of the Second World War, and it led to voters most likely wanting one party to be in majority to give a parliament that could not be hung. In 1944, the tides of the war had turned and the Allied nations looked to win, giving voters more confidence in voting by preference and explaining the more normal electoral result of 46.6%. The previously-excluded SKP also achieved a result of 10.3% in this election. In 1968, the established Communists, most likely due to bad press about the Soviets overtaking of Czechoslovakia (Prague Spring), got a historically bad result of 3% of the votes while the SAP enjoyed 50.1% and an absolute majority in parliament. Only in a fairly brief period between the elections of 1973 to 1979 did the SAP get below the normal interval of 44.6% to 46.2%, instead scoring an average of 43.2%, losing in 1976 (the first time in 44 years) and again just barely in 1979. However, the Social Democrats won back power in 1982 with a normal result of 45.6%.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The voter base consists of a diverse swathe of people throughout Swedish society, although it is particularly strong amongst organised blue-collar workers.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In the 2006 Swedish general election, the SAP received the smallest share of votes (34.99%) ever in a Swedish general election with universal suffrage, resulting in the loss of office to the opposition, the centre-right coalition Alliance for Sweden. Among the support that the SAP lost was the vote of pensioners (down 10% from 2002) and blue-collar trade unionists (down 5%). The combined SAP and Left Party vote of citizens with non-Nordic foreign backgrounds sank from 73% in 2002 to 48% in 2006. Stockholm County typically votes for the centre-right parties and only 23% of Stockholm City residents voted for the SAP in 2006.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: From 2006 to 2014, the SAP lost two consecutive terms to the centre-right Alliance due to the centrist liberal attitudes of then-Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt attracting some of the SAP voters. In 2010, 2014 and 2018, the vote share of SAP dramatically declined, with some of these votes being lost to the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In the 2018 Swedish general election, the Social Democrats' vote share fell to 28.3 percent, its lowest level of support since 1908.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In the 2022 Swedish general election, Social Democrats remained Sweden’s largest party with 30,3% of the vote, however the right bloc won a slim majority in parliament.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The party's first chapter in its statutes says "the intention of the Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party is the struggle towards Democratic Socialism", i.e. a society with a democratic economy based on the socialist principle "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Since the party held power of office for a majority of terms after its founding in 1889 through 2003, the ideology and policies of the SAP have had strong influence on Swedish politics. The Swedish social democratic ideology is partially an outgrowth of the strong and well-organized 1880s and 1890s working class emancipation, temperance and religious "folkrörelser" (folk movements), by which peasant and workers' organizations penetrated state structures early on and paved the way for electoral politics. In this way, Swedish social-democratic ideology is inflected by a socialist tradition foregrounding widespread and individual human development.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In 1967, Gunnar Adler-Karlsson confidently likened the social democratic project to the successful social democratic effort to divest the king of all power but formal grandeur: "Without dangerous and disruptive internal fights. ... After a few decades they [the capitalists] will then remain, perhaps formally as kings, but in reality as naked symbols of a passed and inferior development state."


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The Social Democrats are strong supporters of egalitarianism and maintain a strong opposition to discrimination and racism. The party supports social welfare provision, paid for by progressive taxation. The party also supports a social corporatist economy involving the institutionalization of a social partnership system between capital and labour economic interest groups, with government oversight to resolve disputes between the two factions. Concerning constitutional issues, the Social Democrats advocate the abolition of monarchy.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Liberalism has also strongly infused social-democratic ideology. Liberalism has oriented social democratic goals to security. Tage Erlander, prime minister from 1946 to 1969, described security as "too big a problem for the individual to solve with only his own power". Up to the 1980s, when neoliberalism began to provide an alternative, aggressively pro-capitalist model for ensuring social quiescence, the SAP was able to secure capital's co-operation by convincing capital that it shared the goals of increasing economic growth and reducing social friction. For many Social Democrats, Marxism is loosely held to be valuable for its emphasis on changing the world for a more just, better future. In 1889, Hjalmar Branting, leader of the SAP from its founding to his death in 1925, asserted: "I believe that one benefits the workers so much more by forcing through reforms which alleviate and strengthen their position, than by saying that only a revolution can help them".


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Some observers have argued that this liberal aspect has hardened into increasingly neoliberal ideology and policies, gradually maximizing the latitude of powerful market actors. Certainly, neoclassical economists have been firmly nudging the Social Democratic Party into capitulating to most of capital's traditional preferences and prerogatives which they term "modern industrial relations". Both socialist and liberal aspects of the party were influenced by the dual sympathies of early leader Hjalmar Branting and manifest in the party's first actions, namely reducing the work day to eight hours and establishing the franchise for working-class people.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: While some commentators have seen the party lose focus with the rise of SAP neoliberal study groups, the Swedish Social Democratic Party has for many years appealed to Swedes as innovative, capable and worthy of running the state. The Social Democrats became one of the most successful political parties in the world, with some structural advantages in addition to their auspicious birth within vibrant "folkrörelser". At the close of the 19th century, liberals and socialists had to band together to augment establishment democracy which was at that point embarrassingly behind in Sweden and they could point to formal democratic advances elsewhere to motivate political action. In addition to being small, Sweden was a semi-peripheral country at the beginning of the 20th century, considered unimportant to competing global political factions, so it was permitted more independence while soon the existence of communist and capitalist superpowers allowed social democracy to flourish in the geo-political interstices. The SAP has the resource of sharing ideas and experiences and working with its sister parties throughout the Nordic countries. Sweden could also borrow and innovate upon ideas from English-language economists which was an advantage for the Social Democrats in the Great Depression, but more advantageous for the bourgeois parties in the 1980s and afterward.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Among the social movement tactics of the Swedish Social Democratic Party in the 20th century was its redefinition of "socialization" from "common ownership of the means of production" to increasing "democratic influence over the economy". Starting out in a socialist-liberal coalition fighting for the vote, the Swedish Social Democrats defined socialism as the development of democracy—political and economic. On that basis, they could form coalitions, innovate and govern where other European social democratic parties became crippled and crumbled under right-wing regimes. The Swedish Social Democrats could count the middle class among their solidaristic working class constituency by recognizing the middle class as "economically dependent", "working people", or among the "progressive citizens", rather than as sub-capitalists. The Social Democratic congress of 1932 established that "[t]he party does not aim to support and help [one] working class at the expense of the others". In fact, with social democratic policies that refrained from supporting inefficient and low-profit businesses in favor of cultivating higher-quality working conditions as well as a strong commitment to public education, the middle class in Sweden became so large that the capitalist class has remained concentrated. Not only did the SAP fuse the growing middle class into their constituency, they also ingeniously forged periodic coalitions with small-scale farmers (as members of the "exploited classes") to great strategic effect. The SAP version of socialist ideology allowed them to maintain a prescient view of the working class. The party's 1932 election manifesto asserted that "[the SAP] does not question whether those who have become capitalism's victims are industrial workers, farmers, agricultural laborers, forestry workers, store clerks, civil servants or intellectuals".


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: While the SAP has worked more or less constructively with more radical left-wing parties in Sweden, the Social Democrats have borrowed from socialists some of their discourse and decreasingly the socialist understanding of the structurally compromised position of labor under capitalism. Even more creatively, the Social Democrats commandeered selected, transcendental images from such nationalists as Rudolf Kjellen in 1912, very effectively undercutting fascism's appeal in Sweden. In this way, Per Albin Hansson declared that "there is no more patriotic party than the [SAP since] the most patriotic act is to create a land in which all feel at home", famously igniting Swedes' innermost longing for transcendence with the 1928 idea of the Folkhem, or the People's Home. The Social Democratic Party promoted Folkhemmet as a socialist home at a point in which the party turned its back on class struggle and the policy tool of nationalization. Hansson soothed that "[t]he expansion of the party to a people's party does not mean and must not mean a watering down of socialist demands". He further stated:


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The basis of the home is community and togetherness. The good home does not recognize any privileged or neglected members, nor any favorite or stepchildren. In the good home there is equality, consideration, co-operation, and helpfulness. Applied to the great people's and citizens' home this would mean the breaking down of all the social and economic barriers that now separate citizens into the privileged and the neglected, into the rulers and the dependents, into the rich and the poor, the propertied and the impoverished, the plunderers and the plundered. Swedish society is not yet the people's home. There is a formal equality, equality of political rights, but from a social perspective, the class society remains, and from an economic perspective the dictatorship of the few prevails.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The Social Democratic Party is generally recognized as the main architect of the progressive taxation, fair trade, low-unemployment, active labor market policies (ALMP)-based Swedish welfare state that was developed in the years after World War II. Sweden emerged sound from the Great Depression with a brief, successful "Keynesianism-before Keynes" economic program advocated by Ernst Wigforss, a prominent Social Democrat who educated himself in economics by studying the work of the British radical Liberal economists. The social democratic labor market policies, or ALMPs, were developed in the 1940s and 1950s by LO (Landsorganisationen i Sverige, the blue-collar union federation) economists Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner. The Rehn-Meidner model featured the centralized system of wage bargaining that aimed to both set wages at a just level and promote business efficiency and productivity. With the pre-1983 cooperation of capital and labor federations that bargained independently of the state, the state determined that wages would be higher than the market would set in firms that were inefficient or uncompetitive and lower than the market would set in firms that were highly productive and competitive. Workers were compensated with state-sponsored retraining and relocating. At the same time, the state reformed wages to the goal of "equal pay for equal work", eliminated unemployment ("the reserve army of labor") as a disciplinary device and kept incomes consistently rising while taxing progressively and pooling social wealth to deliver services through local governments. Social Democratic policy has traditionally emphasized a state spending structure, whereby public services are supplied via local government as opposed to emphasizing social insurance program transfers.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: These social democratic policies have had international influence. The early Swedish red–green coalition encouraged Nordic-networked socialists in the state of Minnesota to dedicate efforts to building a similarly potent labor-farmer alliance that put the socialists in the governorship, ran model innovative statewide anti-racism programs in the early years of the 20th century and enabled federal forest managers in Minnesota to practice a precocious ecological-socialism before Democratic Party reformers appropriated the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party infrastructure to the liberal Democratic Party in 1944.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Under the Social Democrats' administration, Sweden retained neutrality as a foreign policy guideline during the wars of the 20th century, including the Cold War. Neutrality preserved the Swedish economy and boosted Sweden's economic competitiveness in the first half of the 20th century as other European countries' economies were devastated by war. Under Olof Palme's Social Democratic leadership, Sweden further aggravated the hostility of United States political conservatives when Palme openly denounced American aggression in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon suspended diplomatic ties with the social democratic country. In 2003, top-ranking Social Democratic Party politician Anna Lindh—who criticized the American-led invasion of Iraq as well as both Israeli and Palestinian atrocities and who was the lead figure promoting the European Union in Sweden—was assassinated in public in Stockholm. As Lindh was to succeed Göran Persson in the party leadership, her death was deeply disruptive to the party as well as to the campaign to promote the adoption of the EMU (euro) in Sweden. The neutrality policy has changed with the contemporary ascendance of the centre-right coalition and Sweden has committed troops to support the United States and United Kingdom's interventions in Afghanistan.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Because the Rehn–Meidner model allowed capitalists owning very productive and efficient firms to retain excess profits at the expense of the firms' workers, thus exacerbating inequality, workers in these firms began to agitate for a share of the profits in the 1970s, just as women working in the state sector began to assert pressure for better wages. Meidner established a study committee that came up with a 1976 proposal that entailed transferring the excess profits into investment funds controlled by the workers in the efficient firms, with the intention that firms would create further employment and pay more workers higher wages, rather than increasing the wealth of company owners and managers. Capitalists immediately distinguished this proposal as socialism, and launched an unprecedented opposition—including calling off the class compromise established in the 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The 1980s were a very turbulent time in Sweden that initiated the occasional decline of Social Democratic Party rule. In the 1980s, pillars of Swedish industry were massively restructured. Shipbuilding was discontinued, wood pulp was integrated into modernized paper production, the steel industry was concentrated and specialized and mechanical engineering was digitalized. In 1986, Olof Palme, one of the Social Democratic Party's strongest champions of democracy and egalitarianism, was assassinated. Swedish capital was increasingly moving Swedish investment into other European countries as the European Union coalesced and a hegemonic consensus was forming among the elite financial community while progressive taxation and pro-egalitarian redistribution became economic heresy. A leading proponent of capital's cause at the time, Social Democrat Finance Minister Kjell-Olof Feldt reminisced in an interview: "The negative inheritance I received from my predecessor Gunnar Sträng (Minister of Finance, 1955–1976) was a strongly progressive tax system with high marginal taxes. This was supposed to bring about a just and equal society. But I eventually came to the opinion that it simply didn't work out that way. Progressive taxes created instead a society of wranglers, cheaters, peculiar manipulations, false ambitions and new injustices. It took me at least a decade to get a part of the party to see this". With the capitalist confederation's defection from the 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement and Swedish capital investing in other European countries rather than Sweden as well as the global rise of neoliberal political-economic hegemony, the Social Democratic Party backed away from the progressive Meidner reform.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The economic crisis in the 1990s has been widely cited in the Anglo-American press as a social democratic failure, but it is important to note not only did profit rates begin to fall worldwide after the 1960s, this period also saw neoliberal ascendance in Social Democratic ideology and policies as well as the rise of bourgeois coalition rule in place of the Social Democrats. 1980s Social Democratic neoliberal measures—such as depressing and deregulating the currency to prop up Swedish exports during the economic restructuring transition, dropping corporate taxation and taxation on high income-earners and switching from anti-unemployment policies to anti-inflationary policies—were exacerbated by international recession, unchecked currency speculation and a Moderate Party government led by Carl Bildt (1991–1994), creating the fiscal crisis of the early 1990s. According to Cerra and Saxena (2005) almost all of the fall in the substantial GDP per capita lead over the OECD average that Sweden enjoyed through the 1960-1990 period can be attributed to the Swedish financial crisis, and there is no evidence for a substantial negative growth impact from egalitarian policies as in the 'Eurosclerosis' hypothesis. The financial crisis can in turn be explained by policy errors. For example in the late 1980's high inflation interacted with the tax code to produce negative real interest rates and an investment boom. However in 1990-1991 the highly trade exposed Swedish economy was impacted by the global downturn, but the commitment to the fixed exchange rate now required a rapid shift to high real interest rates in order to defend the peg, collapsing asset markets and fixed investment. The household savings rate rose appreciably, exacerbated by fears of welfare state retrenchment, exacerbating the fall in aggregate demand. Unemployment rose rapidly, and the banking sector went into crisis as the nonperforming rate rose sharply, prompting a large bailout program. According to Cerra and Saxena, the deep recession had large and permanent negative effects on Swedish GDP, which is consistent with other research suggesting that financial crisis can have extremely persistent effects.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: When the Social Democrats returned to power in 1994, they responded to the fiscal crisis by stabilizing the currency—and by reducing the welfare state and privatizing public services and goods as governments did in many countries influenced by Milton Friedman, the Chicago School of political and economic thought and the neoliberal movement. Social Democratic Party leaders—including Göran Persson, Mona Sahlin and Anna Lindh—promoted European Union (EU) membership and the Swedish referendum passed by 52–48% in favor of joining the EU on 14 August 1994. Liberal leader Lars Leijonborg at his 2007 retirement could recall the 1990s as a golden age of liberalism in which the Social Democrats were under the expanding influence of the Liberals and its partners in the centre-right political coalition. Leijonborg recounted neoliberal victories such as the growth of private schooling and the proliferation of private, for-profit radio and television. It has been argued that the Swedish Social Democrats' Third Way pension reforms have been more successful than those enacted by the German Social Democrats.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In the 21st century, many of the aspects of the social-democratic welfare state continued to function at a high level, due in no small part to the high rate of unionization in Sweden, the independence of unions in wage-setting and the exemplary competency of the feminized public sector workforce as well as widespread public support. The Social Democrats initiated studies on the effects of the neoliberal changes and the picture that emerged from those findings allowed the party to reduce many tax expenditures, slightly increase taxes on high income-earners and significantly reduce taxes on food. The Social Democratic Finance Minister increased spending on child support and continued to pay down the public debt. By 1998, the Swedish macro-economy recovered from the 1980s industrial restructuring and the currency policy excesses. At the turn of the 21st century, Sweden has a well-regarded, generally robust economy and the average quality of life after government transfers is very high, inequality is low (the Gini coefficient is .28) and social mobility is high (compared to the affluent Anglo-American and Central European countries).


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The Social Democratic Party pursues environmentalist and feminist policies which promote healthful and humane conditions. Feminist policies formed and implemented by the Social Democratic Party along with the Green Party and the Left Party (which made an arrangement with the Social Democrats to support the government while not forming a coalition), include paid maternity and paternity leave, high employment for women in the public sector, combining flexible work with living wages and benefits, providing public support for women in their traditional responsibilities for care giving and policies to stimulate women's political participation and leadership. Reviewing policies and institutional practices for their impact on women had become common in social democratic governance.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: The Social Democratic Party was defeated in 2006 by the centre-right Alliance for Sweden coalition which according to research from the Department of Government at Uppsala University can be largely traced to the SAP government's poor handling of the two major natural disasters that struck the Swedish political landscape at the turn of the new year of 2004 and 2005. These disasters are known as the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Storm Gudrun (Erwin). In particular, the Centre Party was very successful in its opposition against the SAP on the issue of the party's poor crisis response to these disasters. Mona Sahlin succeeded Göran Persson as party leader in 2007, becoming the party's first female party leader. Prior to the 2010 Swedish general election, the Social Democratic Party formed a cooperation with the Green Party and the Left Party culminating in the Red–Green alliance. The cooperation was dissolved following another defeat in 2010, throwing the party in to its longest period in opposition since before 1936. Sahlin announced her resignation following the 2010 defeat and she was succeeded by Håkan Juholt in 2011. Initially, his leadership gave a rise in the opinion polls before being involved in a scandal surrounding benefits from parliament which after a period culminated in his resignation. Sahlin and Juholt become the first party leaders since Claes Tholin, who was party leader 1896–1907, to not become Prime Ministers.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: Stefan Löfven, elected by the party board, succeeded Juholt as party leader. Löfven led the Social Democratic Party into the 2014 European Parliament election which resulted in the party's worst electoral results at national level since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921. He then led the party into the 2014 Swedish general election which resulted in the party's second worst election result to the Riksdag since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921. With a hung parliament, Löfven formed a minority coalition government with the Green Party. On 2 October 2014, the Riksdag approved Löfven to become the country's Prime Minister and he took office on 3 October 2014 alongside his Cabinet. The Social Democratic Party and the Green Party voted in favour of Löfvén becoming Prime Minister while the Left Party, a close ally of the SAP, abstained. The oppositional Alliance-parties also abstained while the Sweden Democrats voted against.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In the 2018 Swedish general election, the Social Democrats' vote share fell to 28.3 percent, its lowest level of support since 1911. Nevertheless, a Social Democrat and Green Party coalition government was formed in January 2019. Relying on support of the Centre Party and the Liberals, it is one of the weakest governments in Swedish history.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: In August 2021, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven announced his resignation and finance minister Magdalena Andersson was elected as the new head of Sweden's ruling Social Democrats in November 2021. On 30 November 2021, Magdalena Andersson became Sweden's first female prime minister. She formed a minority government made up of only her Social Democrats. Her plan for forming a new coalition government with the Green Party was unsuccessful because her budget proposal failed to pass.


title: Swedish Social Democratic Party

text: On 18 October 2022, conservative leader Ulf Kristersson became new Prime Minister to succeed Magdalena Andersson, meaning the Social Democratic Party, although still Sweden’s largest party, was in the opposition.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Santa Clara County, officially the County of Santa Clara, is the sixth-most populous county in the U.S. state of California, with a population of 1,936,259, as of the 2020 census. Santa Clara County and neighboring San Benito County together form the U.S. Census Bureau's San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area, which is part of the larger San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area. Santa Clara is the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Northern California. The county seat and largest city is San Jose, the 10th-most populous city in the United States, California's third-most populous city and the most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Home to Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County is an economic center for high technology, and in 2015 had the third-highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the world (after Zürich, Switzerland and Oslo, Norway), according to the Brookings Institution. Located on the southern coast of San Francisco Bay, the urbanized Santa Clara Valley within Santa Clara County contains most of the county's population. More recently, extensive droughts in California, further complicated by drainage of the Anderson reservoir within the county for seismic repairs, have strained the county's water security.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: The county's concentration of wealth, primarily due to the tech industry, has made it the most affluent county on the West Coast of the United States and the most affluent outside the Washington metropolitan area and one of the most affluent places in the United States.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Santa Clara County is named for Mission Santa Clara, which was established in 1777, and was in turn named for Saint Clare of Assisi.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Santa Clara County was one of the original counties of California, formed in 1850 at the time of statehood. The original inhabitants included the Ohlone, residing on Coyote Creek and Calaveras Creek. Part of the county's territory was given to Alameda County in 1853.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: In 1882, Santa Clara County tried to levy taxes upon property of the Southern Pacific Railroad within county boundaries. The result was the U.S. Supreme Court case of "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad", 118 U.S. 394 (1886), in which the court extended due-process rights to artificial legal entities.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: In the early 20th century, the area was promoted as the "Valley of the Heart's Delight" due to its natural beauty, including a significant number of orchards.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: The first major technology company to be based in the area was Hewlett-Packard, founded in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939. IBM selected San Jose as its West Coast headquarters in 1943. Varian Associates, Fairchild Semiconductor, and other early innovators were in the county by the late 1940s and 1950s. The U.S. Navy had a large presence in the area and began giving large contracts to Silicon Valley electronics companies. The term "Silicon Valley" was coined in 1971. The trend accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, and agriculture has since been nearly eliminated from the northern part of the county.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Today, Santa Clara County is the headquarters for about 6500 high-technology companies, including many of the largest ones in the world, among them hardware manufacturers AMD, Nvidia, Cisco Systems, and Intel, computer and consumer electronics companies Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, and internet companies eBay, Google, and Yahoo!. Most of what is considered to be Silicon Valley is within the county, although some adjoining tech regions in San Mateo (e.g., Facebook), Alameda, and Santa Cruz counties are also considered part of Silicon Valley.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of , of which (1.1%) are covered by water.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Counties which border with Santa Clara County are, clockwise, Alameda County, San Joaquin (within a few hundred feet at Mount Boardman), Stanislaus, Merced, San Benito, Santa Cruz, and San Mateo County. Santa Clara County formerly shared borders with Contra Costa, San Francisco, Mariposa, Monterey, and Tuolumne counties until 1853, 1856, 1874, and 1854 respectively (Monterey County currently comes within a few miles of Santa Clara).


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Both tule elk ("Cervus canadensis nannodes") and pronghorn ("Antilocapra americana") were historically native to Santa Clara County. In June 1776, Lieutenant Commander Don José Joaquín Moraga led a group of soldiers and colonists from the Presidio of Monterey to establish Mission San Francisco de Asis and encountered both tule elk and pronghorn, and clearly distinguished these two species from deer. The deer in California being California mule deer ("Odocoileus hemionus").


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Regarding elk, Moraga wrote: “In the great plain called San Bernardino (the Santa Clara Valley which stretches from south San Jose to Gilroy), while the expedition was strung out at length, we descried in the distance a herd of large animals that looked like cattle, but we could not imagine where they belonged or from whence they had come...with horns similar in shape to those of the deer, but so large that they measured sixteen palms from tip to tip.” Upon measurement, Morago reported the elk horns as four varas [11 feet] across… “These animals [elk] are called "ciervos" in order to differentiate them from the ordinary Spanish variety of deer, here called "venados", which also exist in abundance and of large size in the vicinity.”


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Regarding pronghorn, Moraga reported: “In the said plains of San Bernardino (Santa Clara Valley)…there is another species of deer about the size of three-year-old sheep. They are similar in appearance to the deer, except they have short horns and also short legs like the sheep. They live in the plains where they go in herds of 100, 200, or more. They run all together over the plains so fast that they seem to fly…These animals are called "berrendos" and there are many of them also in the southern Missions wherever the country is level.”


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: Herbert Eugene Bolton also wrote of elk reports from another Spanish expedition, from the De Anza Expedition on March 23, 1776: " In Gilroy Valley (Santa Clara Valley) Moraga 's larder was replenished by three elks which the men killed without leaving the road." General John Bidwell, of the 1841 Bartleson-Bidwell Party wrote: "In some of the fertile valleys, such as Napa and Santa Clara, there were elk literally by the thousand.”


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: In 1978, California Department of Fish and Game warden Henry Coletto urged the department to choose the Mount Hamilton area as one of California's relocation sites under a new statewide effort to restore tule elk. While other ranchers refused, tech pioneers Bill Hewlett and David Packard allowed Coletto and state biologists to translocate the initial 32 tule elk from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra onto the San Felipe Ranch, which the families jointly own, in the hills east of Morgan Hill. From the three original 1978–1981 translocations (totaling 65 animals) to the Mount Hamilton region of the Diablo Range, there are multiple herds in different locations including the Isabel Valley, San Antonio Valley, Livermore area, San Felipe Ranch, Metcalf Canyon, Coyote Ridge, Anderson Lake, and surrounding areas such as the Sunol and Cottonwood Creek (near San Luis Reservoir in western Merced County, California) herds. , an estimated 400 tule elk roam in northeastern Santa Clara County and southeastern Alameda County. In March 2014 CDFW translocated nine bull elk from the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge to add genetic diversity to the San Antonio Valley Ecological Reserve herd in San Antonio Valley in extreme eastern Santa Clara County. As of 2017 there were four herds in the Coyote Ridge area, often visible from U. S. Highway 101, according to Craige Edgerton, recently retired executive director of the Silicon Valley Land Conservancy and local naturalist Michael Hundt. In 2019, a fifth herd of tule elk was documented by local naturalist Roger Castillo, likely having split from the Coyote Ridge herd and established itself in Silver Creek Valley around the closed Ranch Golf Club. The elk herds in eastern Santa Clara County are blocked from dispersal to the west by U.S. Highway 101, with environmentalists advocating re-purposing the Metcalf Road bridge at the Coyote Gap into a wildlife overcrossing. This would enable elk to recolonize rural southwestern Santa Clara County, as well as Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties.


title: Santa Clara County, California

text: In 1990, the California Department of Fish and Game's Henry Coletto translocated excess pronghorn from Modoc County to six locations in California, including 51 animals to the San Felipe Ranch in Santa Clara County, where the swift-footed ungulates had not lived for generations. The animals left the San Felipe Ranch for the Isabel and San Antonio Valleys, as well as an area near Lake Del Valle in Alameda County may now be extirpated by poaching, highway vehicle collisions, and insufficient numbers to defend pronghorn fawns against coyote predation. As of 2012, the Isabel Valley Ranch herd had dwindled to 3 animals, and the Lake del Valle herd to 13. Currently, iNaturalist.org has zero observer records of pronghorn in Santa Clara County.