title: Hovercraft

text: This lack of military interest meant that there was no reason to keep the concept secret, and it was declassified. Cockerell was finally able to convince the National Research Development Corporation to fund development of a full-scale model. In 1958, the NRDC placed a contract with Saunders-Roe for the development of what would become the SR.N1, short for "Saunders-Roe, Nautical 1".


title: Hovercraft

text: The SR.N1 was powered by a 450 hp Alvis Leonides engine powering a vertical fan in the middle of the craft. In addition to providing the lift air, a portion of the airflow was bled off into two channels on either side of the craft, which could be directed to provide thrust. In normal operation this extra airflow was directed rearward for forward thrust, and blew over two large vertical rudders that provided directional control. For low-speed maneuverability, the extra thrust could be directed fore or aft, differentially for rotation.


title: Hovercraft

text: The SR.N1 made its first hover on 11 June 1959, and made its famed successful crossing of the English Channel on 25 July 1959. In December 1959, the Duke of Edinburgh visited Saunders-Roe at East Cowes and persuaded the chief test-pilot, Commander Peter Lamb, to allow him to take over the SR.N1's controls. He flew the SR.N1 so fast that he was asked to slow down a little. On examination of the craft afterwards, it was found that she had been dished in the bow due to excessive speed, damage that was never allowed to be repaired, and was from then on affectionately referred to as the 'Royal Dent'.


title: Hovercraft

text: Testing quickly demonstrated that the idea of using a single engine to provide air for both the lift curtain and forward flight required too many trade-offs. A Blackburn Marboré turbojet for forward thrust and two large vertical rudders for directional control were added, producing the SR.N1 Mk II. A further upgrade with the Armstrong Siddeley Viper produced the Mk III. Further modifications, especially the addition of pointed nose and stern areas, produced the Mk IV.


title: Hovercraft

text: Although the SR.N1 was successful as a testbed, the design hovered too close to the surface to be practical; at even small waves would hit the bow. The solution was offered by Cecil Latimer-Needham, following a suggestion made by his business partner Arthur Ord-Hume. In 1958, he suggested the use of two rings of rubber to produce a double-walled extension of the vents in the lower fuselage. When air was blown into the space between the sheets it exited the bottom of the skirt in the same way it formerly exited the bottom of the fuselage, re-creating the same momentum curtain, but this time at some distance from the bottom of the craft.


title: Hovercraft

text: Latimer-Needham and Cockerell devised a high skirt design, which was fitted to the SR.N1 to produce the Mk V, displaying hugely improved performance, with the ability to climb over obstacles almost as high as the skirt. In October 1961, Latimer-Needham sold his skirt patents to Westland, who had recently taken over Saunders Roe's interest in the hovercraft. Experiments with the skirt design demonstrated a problem; it was originally expected that pressure applied to the outside of the skirt would bend it inward, and the now-displaced airflow would cause it to pop back out. What actually happened is that the slight narrowing of the distance between the walls resulted in less airflow, which in turn led to more air loss under that section of the skirt. The fuselage above this area would drop due to the loss of lift at that point, and this led to further pressure on the skirt.


title: Hovercraft

text: After considerable experimentation, Denys Bliss at Hovercraft Development Ltd. found the solution to this problem. Instead of using two separate rubber sheets to form the skirt, a single sheet of rubber was bent into a U shape to provide both sides, with slots cut into the bottom of the U forming the annular vent. When deforming pressure was applied to the outside of this design, air pressure in the rest of the skirt forced the inner wall to move in as well, keeping the channel open. Although there was some deformation of the curtain, the airflow within the skirt was maintained and the lift remained relatively steady. Over time, this design evolved into individual extensions over the bottom of the slots in the skirt, known as "fingers".


title: Hovercraft

text: Through these improvements, the hovercraft became an effective transport system for high-speed service on water and land, leading to widespread developments for military vehicles, search and rescue, and commercial operations. By 1962, many UK aviation and shipbuilding firms were working on hovercraft designs, including Saunders Roe/Westland, Vickers-Armstrong, William Denny, Britten-Norman and Folland. Small-scale ferry service started as early as 1962 with the launch of the Vickers-Armstrong VA-3. With the introduction of the 254 passenger and 30 car carrying SR.N4 cross-channel ferry by Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed in 1968, hovercraft had developed into useful commercial craft.


title: Hovercraft

text: Another major pioneering effort of the early hovercraft era was carried out by Jean Bertin's firm in France. Bertin was an advocate of the "multi-skirt" approach, which used a number of smaller cylindrical skirts instead of one large one in order to avoid the problems noted above. During the early 1960s he developed a series of prototype designs, which he called "terraplanes" if they were aimed for land use, and "naviplanes" for water. The best known of these designs was the N500 Naviplane, built for Seaspeed by the "Société d'Etude et de Développement des Aéroglisseurs Marins" (SEDAM). The N500 could carry 400 passengers, 55 cars and five buses. It set a speed record between Boulogne and Dover of . It was rejected by its operators, who claimed that it was unreliable.


title: Hovercraft

text: Another discovery was that the total amount of air needed to lift the craft was a function of the roughness of the surface over which it travelled. On flat surfaces, like pavement, the required air pressure was so low that hovercraft were able to compete in energy terms with conventional systems like steel wheels. However, the hovercraft lift system acted as both a lift and a very effective suspension, and thus it naturally lent itself to high-speed use where conventional suspension systems were considered too complex. This led to a variety of "hovertrain" proposals during the 1960s, including England's Tracked Hovercraft and France's "Aérotrain". In the U.S., Rohr Inc. and Garrett both took out licenses to develop local versions of the "Aérotrain". These designs competed with maglev systems in the high-speed arena, where their primary advantage was the very "low tech" tracks they needed. On the downside, the air blowing dirt and trash out from under the trains presented a unique problem in stations, and interest in them waned in the 1970s.


title: Hovercraft

text: By the early 1970s, the basic concept had been well developed, and the hovercraft had found a number of niche roles where its combination of features were advantageous. Today, they are found primarily in military use for amphibious operations, search-and-rescue vehicles in shallow water, and sporting vehicles.


title: Hovercraft

text: Hovercraft can be powered by one or more engines. Small craft, such as the SR.N6, usually have one engine with the drive split through a gearbox. On vehicles with several engines, one usually drives the fan (or impeller), which is responsible for lifting the vehicle by forcing high pressure air under the craft. The air inflates the "skirt" under the vehicle, causing it to rise above the surface. Additional engines provide thrust in order to propel the craft. Some hovercraft use ducting to allow one engine to perform both tasks by directing some of the air to the skirt, the rest of the air passing out of the back to push the craft forward.


title: Hovercraft

text: The British aircraft and marine engineering company Saunders-Roe built the first practical human-carrying hovercraft for the National Research Development Corporation, the SR.N1, which carried out several test programmes in 1959 to 1961 (the first public demonstration was in 1959), including a cross-channel test run in July 1959, piloted by Peter "Sheepy" Lamb, an ex-naval test pilot and the chief test pilot at Saunders Roe. Christopher Cockerell was on board, and the flight took place on the 50th anniversary of Louis Blériot's first aerial crossing.


title: Hovercraft

text: The SR.N1 was powered by a single piston engine, driven by expelled air. Demonstrated at the Farnborough Airshow in 1960, it was shown that this simple craft can carry a load of up to 12 marines with their equipment as well as the pilot and co-pilot with only a slight reduction in hover height proportional to the load carried. The SR.N1 did not have any skirt, using instead the peripheral air principle that Cockerell had patented. It was later found that the craft's hover height was improved by the addition of a skirt of flexible fabric or rubber around the hovering surface to contain the air. The skirt was an independent invention made by a Royal Navy officer, C.H. Latimer-Needham, who sold his idea to Westland (by then the parent of Saunders-Roe's helicopter and hovercraft interests), and who worked with Cockerell to develop the idea further.


title: Hovercraft

text: The first passenger-carrying hovercraft to enter service was the Vickers VA-3, which, in the summer of 1962, carried passengers regularly along the north Wales coast from Moreton, Merseyside, to Rhyl. It was powered by two turboprop aero-engines and driven by propellers.


title: Hovercraft

text: During the 1960s, Saunders-Roe developed several larger designs that could carry passengers, including the SR.N2, which operated across the Solent, in 1962, and later the SR.N6, which operated across the Solent from Southsea to Ryde on the Isle of Wight for many years. In 1963 the SR.N2 was used in experimental service between Weston-super-Mare and Penarth under the aegis of P & A Campbell, the paddle steamer operators.


title: Hovercraft

text: Operations by Hovertravel commenced on 24 July 1965, using the SR.N6, which carried 38 passengers. Two 98 seat AP1-88 hovercraft were introduced on this route in 1983, and in 2007, these were joined by the first 130-seat BHT130 craft. The AP1-88 and the BHT130 were notable as they were largely built by Hoverwork using shipbuilding techniques and materials (i.e. welded aluminium structure and diesel engines) rather than the aircraft techniques used to build the earlier craft built by Saunders-Roe-British Hovercraft Corporation. Over 20 million passengers had used the service as of 2004 – the service is still operating () and is by far the longest, continuously operated hovercraft service.


title: Hovercraft

text: In 1966, two cross-channel passenger hovercraft services were inaugurated using SR.N6 hovercraft. Hoverlloyd ran services from Ramsgate Harbour, England, to Calais, France, and Townsend Ferries also started a service to Calais from Dover, which was soon superseded by that of Seaspeed.


title: Hovercraft

text: As well as Saunders-Roe and Vickers (which combined in 1966 to form the British Hovercraft Corporation (BHC)), other commercial craft were developed during the 1960s in the UK by Cushioncraft (part of the Britten-Norman Group) and Hovermarine based at Woolston (the latter being "sidewall hovercraft", where the sides of the hull projected down into the water to trap the cushion of air with normal hovercraft skirts at the bow and stern). One of these models, the HM-2, was used by Red Funnel between Southampton (near the Woolston Floating Bridge) and Cowes.


title: Hovercraft

text: The world's first car-carrying hovercraft was made in 1968, the BHC "Mountbatten" class (SR.N4) models, each powered by four Bristol Proteus turboshaft engines. These were both used by rival operators Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed (which joined to form Hoverspeed in 1981) to operate regular car and passenger carrying services across the English Channel. Hoverlloyd operated from Ramsgate, where a special hoverport had been built at Pegwell Bay, to Calais. Seaspeed operated from Dover, England, to Calais and Boulogne in France. The first SR.N4 had a capacity of 254 passengers and 30 cars, and a top speed of . The channel crossing took around 30 minutes and was run like an airline with flight numbers. The later SR.N4 Mk.III had a capacity of 418 passengers and 60 cars. These were later joined by the French-built SEDAM N500 Naviplane with a capacity of 385 passengers and 45 cars; only one entered service and was used intermittently for a few years on the cross-channel service until returned to SNCF in 1983. The service ceased on 1 October 2000 after 32 years, due to competition with traditional ferries, catamarans, the disappearance of duty-free shopping within the EU, the advancing age of the SR.N4 hovercraft, and the opening of the Channel Tunnel.


title: Hovercraft

text: The commercial success of hovercraft suffered from rapid rises in fuel prices during the late 1960s and 1970s, following conflict in the Middle East. Alternative over-water vehicles, such as wave-piercing catamarans (marketed as the SeaCat in the UK until 2005), use less fuel and can perform most of the hovercraft's marine tasks. Although developed elsewhere in the world for both civil and military purposes, except for the Solent Ryde-to-Southsea crossing, hovercraft disappeared from the coastline of Britain until a range of Griffon Hoverwork were bought by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.


title: Hovercraft

text: Hovercraft used to ply between the Gateway of India in Mumbai and CBD Belapur and Vashi in Navi Mumbai between 1994 and 1999, but the services were subsequently stopped due to the lack of sufficient water transport infrastructure.


title: Hovercraft

text: In Finland, small hovercraft are widely used in maritime rescue and during the rasputitsa ("mud season") as archipelago liaison vehicles. In England, hovercraft of the Burnham-on-Sea Area Rescue Boat (BARB) are used to rescue people from thick mud in Bridgwater Bay. Avon Fire and Rescue Service became the first Local Authority fire service in the UK to operate a hovercraft. It is used to rescue people from thick mud in the Weston-super-Mare area and during times of inland flooding. A Griffon rescue Hovercraft has been in use for a number of years with the Airport Fire Service at Dundee Airport in Scotland. It is used in the event of an aircraft ditching in the Tay estuary. Numerous fire departments around the US/Canadian Great Lakes operate hovercraft for water and ice rescues, often of ice fisherman stranded when ice breaks off from shore. The Canadian Coast Guard uses hovercraft to break light ice.


title: Hovercraft

text: In October 2008, The Red Cross commenced a flood-rescue service hovercraft based in Inverness, Scotland. Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service received two flood-rescue hovercraft donated by Severn Trent Water following the 2007 UK floods.


title: Hovercraft

text: Since 2006, hovercraft have been used in aid in Madagascar by HoverAid, an international NGO who use the hovercraft to reach the most remote places on the island.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Scandinavian airline SAS used to charter an AP1-88 hovercraft for regular passengers between Copenhagen Airport, Denmark, and the SAS Hovercraft Terminal in Malmö, Sweden.


title: Hovercraft

text: In 1998, the US Postal Service began using the British built Hoverwork AP1-88 to haul mail, freight, and passengers from Bethel, Alaska, to and from eight small villages along the Kuskokwim River. Bethel is far removed from the Alaska road system, thus making the hovercraft an attractive alternative to the air based delivery methods used prior to introduction of the hovercraft service. Hovercraft service is suspended for several weeks each year while the river is beginning to freeze to minimize damage to the river ice surface. The hovercraft is able to operate during the freeze-up period; however, this could potentially break the ice and create hazards for villagers using their snowmobiles along the river during the early winter.


title: Hovercraft

text: In 2006, Kvichak Marine Industries of Seattle, US built, under license, a cargo/passenger version of the Hoverwork BHT130. Designated 'Suna-X', it is used as a high speed ferry for up to 47 passengers and of freight serving the remote Alaskan villages of King Cove and Cold Bay.


title: Hovercraft

text: An experimental service was operated in Scotland across the Firth of Forth (between Kirkcaldy and Portobello, Edinburgh), from 16 to 28 July 2007. Marketed as "Forthfast", the service used a craft chartered from Hovertravel and achieved an 85% passenger load factor. , the possibility of establishing a permanent service is still under consideration.


title: Hovercraft

text: Since the channel routes abandoned hovercraft, and pending any reintroduction on the Scottish route, the United Kingdom's only public hovercraft service is that operated by Hovertravel between Southsea (Portsmouth) and Ryde on the Isle of Wight.


title: Hovercraft

text: From the 1960s, several commercial lines were operated in Japan, without much success. In Japan the last commercial line had linked Ōita Airport and central Ōita but was shut down in October 2009.


title: Hovercraft

text: Hovercraft are still manufactured in the UK, near to where they were first conceived and tested, on the Isle of Wight. They can also be chartered for a wide variety of uses including inspections of shallow bed offshore wind farms and VIP or passenger use. A typical vessel would be a Tiger IV or a Griffon. They are light, fast, road transportable and very adaptable with the unique feature of minimising damage to environments.


title: Hovercraft

text: The first application of the hovercraft for military use was by the British Armed Forces, using hovercraft built by Saunders-Roe. In 1961, the United Kingdom set up the Interservice Hovercraft Trials Unit (IHTU) based at RNAS Lee-on-Solent (HMS Daedalus), now the site of the Hovercraft Museum, near Portsmouth. This unit carried out trials on the SR.N1 from Mk1 through Mk5 as well as testing the SR.N2, SR.N3, SR.N5 and SR.N6 craft. The Hovercraft Trials Unit (Far East) was established by the Royal Navy at Singapore in August 1964 with two armed hovercraft; they were deployed later that year to Tawau in Malaysian Borneo and operated on waterways there during the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation. The hovercraft's inventor, Sir Christopher Cockerell, claimed late in his life that the Falklands War could have been won far more easily had the British military shown more commitment to the hovercraft; although earlier trials had been conducted in the Falkland Islands with an SRN-6, the hovercraft unit had been disbanded by the time of the conflict. Currently, the Royal Marines use the Griffonhoverwork 2400TD hovercraft, the replacement for the Griffon 2000 TDX Class ACV, which was deployed operationally by the marines in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.


title: Hovercraft

text: In the US, during the 1960s, Bell licensed and sold the Saunders-Roe SR.N5 as the Bell SK-5. They were deployed on trial to the Vietnam War by the United States Navy as "PACV" patrol craft in the Mekong Delta where their mobility and speed was unique. This was used in both the UK SR.N5 curved deck configuration and later with modified flat deck, gun turret and grenade launcher designated the 9255 PACV. The United States Army also experimented with the use of SR.N5 hovercraft in Vietnam. Three hovercraft with the flat deck configuration were deployed to Đồng Tâm in the Mekong Delta region and later to Ben Luc. They saw action primarily in the Plain of Reeds. One was destroyed in early 1970 and another in August of that same year, after which the unit was disbanded. The only remaining U.S. Army SR.N5 hovercraft is currently on display in the Army Transport Museum in Virginia. Experience led to the proposed Bell SK-10, which was the basis for the LCAC-class air-cushioned landing craft now deployed by the U.S. and Japanese Navy. Developed and tested in the mid-1970s, the LACV-30 was used by the US Army to transport military cargo in logistics-over-the-shore operations from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Soviet Union was the world's largest developer of military hovercraft. Their designs range from the small Czilim class ACV, comparable to the SR.N6, to the monstrous Zubr class LCAC, the world's largest hovercraft. The Soviet Union was also one of the first nations to use a hovercraft, the Bora, as a guided missile corvette, though this craft possessed rigid, non-inflatable sides. With the fall of the Soviet Union, most Soviet military hovercraft fell into disuse and disrepair. Only recently has the modern Russian Navy begun building new classes of military hovercraft.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Iranian Navy operates multiple British-made and some Iranian-produced hovercraft. The Tondar or Thunderbolt comes in varieties designed for combat and transportation. Iran has equipped the Tondar with mid-range missiles, machine guns and retrievable reconnaissance drones. Currently they are used for water patrols and combat against drug smugglers.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Finnish Navy designed an experimental missile attack hovercraft class, Tuuli class hovercraft, in the late 1990s. The prototype of the class, "Tuuli", was commissioned in 2000. It proved an extremely successful design for a littoral fast attack craft, but due to fiscal reasons and doctrinal change in the Navy, the hovercraft was soon withdrawn.


title: Hovercraft

text: The People's Army Navy of China operates the Jingsah II class LCAC. This troop and equipment carrying hovercraft is roughly the Chinese equivalent of the U.S. Navy LCAC.


title: Hovercraft

text: Small commercially manufactured, kit or plan-built hovercraft are increasingly being used for recreational purposes, such as inland racing and cruising on inland lakes and rivers, marshy areas, estuaries and inshore coastal waters.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Hovercraft Cruising Club supports the use of hovercraft for cruising in coastal and inland waterways, lakes and lochs.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Hovercraft Club of Great Britain, founded in 1966, regularly organizes inland and coastal hovercraft race events at various venues across the United Kingdom. Similar events are also held in Europe and the US.


title: Hovercraft

text: In August 2010, the Hovercraft Club of Great Britain hosted the World Hovercraft Championships at Towcester Racecourse, followed by the 2016 World Hovercraft Championships at the West Midlands Water Ski Centre in Tamworth.


title: Hovercraft

text: The World Hovercraft Championships are run under the auspices of the World Hovercraft Federation. So far the World Hovercraft Championships had been hosted by France: 1993 in Verneuil, 1997 in Lucon, 2006 at the Lac de Tolerme; Germany: 1987 in Bad Karlshafen, 2004 in Berlin, 2012 and 2018 in Saalburg; Portugal: 1995 in Peso de la Regua; Sweden: 2008 and 2022 at Flottbro Ski Center in Huddinge; UK 1991 and 2000 at Weston Parc; US: 1989 in Troy (Ohio), 2002 in Terre Haute. The 2020 World Hovercraft Championships had to be postponed to 2022 due to restriction caused by the Covid-19 outbreak.


title: Hovercraft

text: Apart from the craft designed as "racing hovercraft", which are often only suitable for racing, there is another form of small personal hovercraft for leisure use, often referred to as cruising hovercraft, capable of carrying up to four people. Just like their full size counterparts, the ability of these small personal hovercraft to safely cross all types of terrain, (e.g. water, sandbanks, swamps, ice, etc.) and reach places often inaccessible by any other type of craft, makes them suitable for a number of roles, such as survey work and patrol and rescue duties in addition to personal leisure use. Increasingly, these craft are being used as yacht tenders, enabling yacht owners and guests to travel from a waiting yacht to, for example, a secluded beach. In this role, small hovercraft can offer a more entertaining alternative to the usual small boat and can be a rival for the jet-ski. The excitement of a personal hovercraft can now be enjoyed at "experience days", which are popular with families, friends and those in business, who often see them as team building exercises. This level of interest has naturally led to a hovercraft rental sector and numerous manufacturers of small, ready built designs of personal hovercraft to serve the need.


title: Hovercraft

text: A real benefit of air cushion vehicles in moving heavy loads over difficult terrain, such as swamps, was overlooked by the excitement of the British Government funding to develop high-speed hovercraft. It was not until the early 1970s that the technology was used for moving a modular marine barge with a dragline on board for use over soft reclaimed land.


title: Hovercraft

text: Mackace (Mackley Air Cushion Equipment), now known as Hovertrans, produced a number of successful Hoverbarges, such as the 250 ton payload "Sea Pearl", which operated in Abu Dhabi, and the twin 160 ton payload "Yukon Princesses", which ferried trucks across the Yukon River to aid the pipeline build. Hoverbarges are still in operation today. In 2006, Hovertrans (formed by the original managers of Mackace) launched a 330-ton payload drilling barge in the swamps of Suriname.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Hoverbarge technology is somewhat different from high-speed hovercraft, which has traditionally been constructed using aircraft technology. The initial concept of the air cushion barge has always been to provide a low-tech amphibious solution for accessing construction sites using typical equipment found in this area, such as diesel engines, ventilating fans, winches and marine equipment. The load to move a 200 ton payload ACV barge at would only be 5 tons. The skirt and air distribution design on high-speed craft again is more complex, as they have to cope with the air cushion being washed out by a wave and wave impact. The slow speed and large mono chamber of the hover barge actually helps reduce the effect of wave action, giving a very smooth ride.


title: Hovercraft

text: The low pull force enabled a Boeing 107 helicopter to pull a hoverbarge across snow, ice and water in 1982.


title: Hovercraft

text: Several attempts have been made to adopt air cushion technology for use in fixed track systems, in order to use the lower frictional forces for delivering high speeds. The most advanced example of this was the Aérotrain, an experimental high speed hovertrain built and operated in France between 1965 and 1977. The project was abandoned in 1977 due to lack of funding, the death of its lead engineer and the adoption of the TGV by the French government as its high-speed ground transport solution.


title: Hovercraft

text: A test track for a tracked hovercraft system was built at Earith near Cambridge, England. It ran southwest from Sutton Gault, sandwiched between the Old Bedford River and the smaller Counter Drain to the west. Careful examination of the site will still reveal traces of the concrete piers used to support the structure. The actual vehicle, RTV31, is preserved at Railworld in Peterborough and can be seen from trains, just south west of Peterborough railway station. The vehicle achieved on 7 February 1973 but the project was cancelled a week later. The project was managed by Tracked Hovercraft Ltd., with Denys Bliss as Director in the early 1970s, then axed by the Aerospace Minister, Michael Heseltine. Records of this project are available from the correspondence and papers of Sir Harry Legge-Bourke, MP at Leeds University Library. Heseltine was accused by Airey Neave and others of misleading the House of Commons when he stated that the government was still considering giving financial support to the Hovertrain, when the decision to pull the plug had already been taken by the Cabinet.


title: Hovercraft

text: After the Cambridge project was abandoned due to financial constraints, parts of the project were picked up by the engineering firm Alfred McAlpine, and abandoned in the mid-1980s. The Tracked Hovercraft project and Professor Laithwaite's Maglev train system were contemporaneous, and there was intense competition between the two prospective British systems for funding and credibility.


title: Hovercraft

text: At the other end of the speed spectrum, the U-Bahn Serfaus has been in continuous operation since 1985. This is an unusual underground air cushion funicular rapid transit system, situated in the Austrian ski resort of Serfaus. Only long, the line reaches a maximum speed of . A similar system also exists in Narita International Airport near Tokyo, Japan.


title: Hovercraft

text: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Transport's Urban Mass Transit Administration (UMTA) funded several hovertrain projects, which were known as Tracked Air Cushion Vehicles or TACVs. They were also known as Aerotrains since one of the builders had a licence from Bertin's Aerotrain company. Three separate projects were funded. Research and development was carried out by Rohr, Inc., Garrett AiResearch and Grumman. UMTA built an extensive test site in Pueblo, Colorado, with different types of tracks for the different technologies used by the prototype contractors. They managed to build prototypes and do a few test runs before the funding was cut.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Hoover Constellation was a spherical canister-type vacuum cleaner notable for its lack of wheels. Floating on a cushion of air, it was a domestic hovercraft. They were not especially good as vacuum cleaners as the air escaping from under the cushion blew uncollected dust in all directions, nor as hovercraft as their lack of a skirt meant that they only hovered effectively over a smooth surface. Despite this, original Constellations are sought-after collectibles today.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Flymo is an air-cushion lawn mower that uses a fan on the cutter blade to provide lift. This allows it to be moved in any direction, and provides double-duty as a mulcher.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Marylebone Cricket Club owns a "hover cover" that it uses regularly to cover the pitch at Lord's Cricket Ground. This device is easy and quick to move, and has no pressure points, making damage to the pitch less likely. The system is quite popular at major pitches in the UK.


title: Hovercraft

text: The Hovercraft Museum at Lee-on-the-Solent, Hampshire, England, houses the world's largest collection of hovercraft designs, including some of the earliest and largest. Much of the collection is housed within the retired SR.N4 hovercraft "Princess Anne". She is the last of her kind in the world.


title: Hovercraft

text: , Hovercraft continue in use between Ryde on the Isle of Wight and Southsea on the English mainland. The service, operated by Hovertravel, schedules up to three crossings each hour, and provides the fastest way of getting on or off the island. Large passenger-hovercraft are still manufactured on the Isle of Wight.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: "Don't You (Forget About Me)" is a song by the Scottish rock band Simple Minds, released as a single in 1985. It was written and composed by the producer Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff, a guitarist and songwriter from the Nina Hagen band. Forsey and Schiff wrote it for Simple Minds, and offered it to several acts before Simple Minds agreed to record it. The song was used in the 1985 John Hughes film "The Breakfast Club" and the 2010 film "Easy A".


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: "Don't You (Forget About Me)" was written by the producer Keith Forsey and the guitarist Steve Schiff while they were scoring the 1985 film "The Breakfast Club". Forsey and Schiff were inspired by the scene in which an introvert and a school bully bond while no one else is watching. Forsey said, "It was: don't forget, when we're back in the classroom, you're not just a bad guy and we've got other things in common."


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: Schiff and Forsey were Simple Minds fans and wrote the song with the band in mind. Forsey played a demo for the band's label, A&M Records, which invited him to meet the band backstage after one of their "Tour du Monde" shows in the U.S. However, A&M did not notify Simple Minds that Forsey would appear, and the band declined to record the song.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: Forsey offered "Don't You (Forget About Me)" to Bryan Ferry, who declined as he was working on his album "Boys and Girls." Ferry said later: "It was just bad timing ... Keith Forsey sent me a demo of the song and it sounded like a hit to me. Simple Minds did a great version of it." Billy Idol, whom Forsey was producing at the time, also declined. A&M suggested Corey Hart, who had a hit at the time with "Sunglasses at Night", but Forsey did not think Hart was the right singer. Cy Curnin, the lead singer of the Fixx, also declined.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: According to the Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr, Simple Minds were reluctant to record the song as they felt they should only record their own material. He said in 2018: "We are Simple Minds—we don't do songs that sound like Simple Minds. We are Simple Minds. We do our own songs." The band also were frustrated that their attempts to find success in the US market had not found significant radio airplay, and did not see how recording the song would change this.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: The band relented after persuasion from A&M and from Chrissie Hynde, Kerr's wife at the time, and after receiving a phone call from Forsey in which he reiterated his admiration for the band. According to one account, the band "rearranged and recorded 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' in three hours in the north London studio and promptly forgot about it," believing that it would be a throwaway song on the soundtrack to a forgettable movie.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: In the process of recording, Simple Minds added parts such as Kerr's "la la la" vocal fills. They resumed work on "Once Upon a Time", their next album. However, some of the band members had realised they had recorded something with commercial potential.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: The music video, filmed inside Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, was directed by Daniel Kleinman. It takes place in a darkened room with a chandelier, a rocking horse, a jukebox, and television sets displaying scenes from "The Breakfast Club". The room gets increasingly cluttered with random objects as the video progresses until the last minute. The video was published on YouTube on 3 December 2010; as of July 2022, it had been viewed more than 240 million times.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: The song became a number-one hit in the US in May 1985 and in Canada in June 1985. It is also the band's only number-one hit on the US Top Rock Tracks chart, staying atop that chart for three weeks. While only reaching number seven in the UK, it stayed on the charts from 1985 to 1987, one of the longest timespans for any single in the history of the chart.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: "Cash Box" said that "though the lyric theme is a simple enough declaration, the lead vocals and vivid orchestration make the tune complex and moving."


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: The song did not appear on the band's subsequent album "Once Upon a Time", but it did appear on the 1992 greatest hits compilation "Glittering Prize 81/92". It soon became a fixture of the band's live sets – with an extended audience participation section during its inclusion on the 2015 tour to promote the band's "Big Music" album.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: Two versions were created for release. A short version, 4:23 in duration, appeared on the single and the original motion-picture soundtrack album of "The Breakfast Club". A longer version, 6:32 in duration, was released as a 12-inch single. This version contains longer breakdowns and drum fills, a second appearance of the bridge, and a longer ending.


title: Don't You (Forget About Me)

text: John Leland from "Spin" wrote, Don't You Forget About Me,' a romantic and melancholy dance track, therefore cuts ice both in the living room and on the dance floor."


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" is an English nursery rhyme, the earliest printed version of which dates from around 1744. The words have not changed very much in two and a half centuries. It is sung to a variant of the 1761 French melody "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman".


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: The rhyme is a single stanza in trochaic metre, which is common in nursery rhymes and relatively easy for younger children. The Roud Folk Song Index, which catalogues folk songs and their variations by number, classifies the song as 4439 and variations have been collected across Great Britain and North America.


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: The rhyme is usually sung to a variant of the 1761 French melody "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman", which is also used for "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", "Little Polly Flinders", and "Alphabet song". The words and melody were first published together by A. H. Rosewig in "(Illustrated National) Nursery Songs and Games", published in Philadelphia in 1879.


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: The text was translated to Swedish by August Strindberg for "Barnen i skogen" (1872), a Swedish edition of "Babes in the Wood". To this Swedish text a melody was written by Alice Tegnér and published in the songbook "Sjung med oss, Mamma!" (1892), where the black sheep is now a white lamb: "Bä, bä, vita lamm", one of the most popular Swedish children's songs.


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: As with many nursery rhymes, attempts have been made to find origins and meanings for the rhyme, most of which have no corroborating evidence. Katherine Elwes Thomas in "The Real Personages of Mother Goose" (1930) suggested the rhyme referred to resentment at the heavy taxation on wool. This has particularly been taken to refer to the medieval English "Great" or "Old Custom" wool tax of 1275, which survived until the fifteenth century More recently the rhyme has been alleged to have a connection to the slave trade, particularly in the southern United States. This explanation was advanced during debates over political correctness and the use and reform of nursery rhymes in the 1980s, but has no supporting historical evidence. Rather than being negative, the wool of black sheep may have been prized as it could be made into dark cloth without dyeing.


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: The rhyme was first printed in "Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book", the oldest surviving collection of English language nursery rhymes, published c. 1744 with the lyrics very similar to the contemporary version:


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: In the next surviving printing, in "Mother Goose's Melody" (c. 1765), the rhyme remained the same, except the last lines, which were given as, "But none for the little boy Who cries in the lane".


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: A controversy emerged over changing the language of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in Britain from 1986, because, it was alleged in the popular press, it was seen as racially dubious. This was based only on a rewriting of the rhyme in one private nursery as an exercise for the children there and not on any local government policy. A similar controversy emerged in 1999 when reservations about the rhyme were submitted to Birmingham City Council by a working group on racism in children's resources, which were never approved or implemented. Two private nurseries in Oxfordshire in 2006 altered the song to "Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep", with black being replaced with a variety of other adjectives, like "happy, sad, hopping" and "pink". Commentators have asserted that these controversies have been exaggerated or distorted by some elements of the press as part of a more general campaign against political correctness.


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: The phrase "yes sir, yes sir, three bags full sir" has been used to describe any obsequious or craven subordinate. It is attested from 1910, and originally was common in the British Royal Navy.


title: Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

text: The rhyme has often been raised in literature and popular culture. Rudyard Kipling used the rhyme as the title of a semi-autobiographical short story he wrote in 1888. The name Black Sheep Squadron was used for the Marine Attack Squadron 214 of the United States Marine Corps from 1942 and the title "Baa Baa Black Sheep" was used for a book by its leader Colonel Gregory "Pappy" Boyington and for a TV series (later syndicated as Black Sheep Squadron) that aired on NBC from 1976 until 1978. In 1951, together with "In the Mood", "Baa Baa Black Sheep" was the first song ever to be digitally saved and played on a computer.


title: Nightmare

text: A nightmare, also known as a bad dream, is an unpleasant dream that can cause a strong emotional response from the mind, typically fear but also despair, anxiety or great sadness. However, psychological nomenclature differentiates between "nightmares" and "bad dreams"; specifically, people remain asleep during bad dreams, whereas nightmares can awaken individuals. The dream may contain situations of discomfort, psychological or physical terror, or panic. After a nightmare, a person will often awaken in a state of distress and may be unable to return to sleep for a short period of time. Recurrent nightmares may require medical help, as they can interfere with sleeping patterns and cause insomnia.


title: Nightmare

text: Nightmares can have physical causes such as sleeping in an uncomfortable position or having a fever, or psychological causes such as stress or anxiety. Eating before going to sleep, which triggers an increase in the body's metabolism and brain activity, can be a potential stimulus for nightmares.


title: Nightmare

text: The prevalence of nightmares in children (5–12 years old) is between 20 and 30%, and for adults is between 8 and 30%. In common language, the meaning of "nightmare" has extended as a metaphor to many bad things, such as a bad situation or a scary monster or person.


title: Nightmare

text: The word "nightmare" is derived from the Old English , a mythological demon or goblin who torments others with frightening dreams. The term has no connection with the Modern English word for a female horse. The word "nightmare" is cognate with the Dutch term and German (dated).


title: Nightmare

text: The sorcerous demons of Iranian mythology known as Divs are likewise associated with the ability to afflict their victims with nightmares.


title: Nightmare

text: The mare of Germanic and Slavic folklore were thought to ride on people's chests while they sleep, causing nightmares.


title: Nightmare

text: Those with nightmares experience abnormal sleep architecture. The impact of having a nightmare during the night has been found to be very similar to that of insomnia. This is thought to be caused by frequent nocturnal awakenings and fear of falling asleep. Nightmare disorder symptoms include repeated awakenings from the major sleep period or naps with detailed recall of extended and extremely frightening dreams, usually involving threats to survival, security, or self-esteem. The awakenings generally occur during the second half of the sleep period.


title: Nightmare

text: According to the International Classification of Sleep Disorders-Third Edition (ICSD-3), the nightmare disorder, together with REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) and recurrent isolated sleep paralysis, form the REM-related parasomnias subcategory of the Parasomnias cluster. Nightmares may be idiopathic without any signs of psychopathology or associated with disorders like stress, anxiety, substance abuse, psychiatric illness or PTSD (>80% of PTSD patients report nightmares). As regarding the dream content of the dreams they are usually imprinting negative emotions like sadness, fear or rage. According to the clinical studies the content can include being chased, injury or death of others, falling, natural disasters or accidents. Typical dreams or recurrent dreams may also have some of these topics.


title: Nightmare

text: Scientific research shows that nightmares may have many causes. In a study focusing on children, researchers were able to conclude that nightmares directly correlate with the stress in children's lives. Children who experienced the death of a family member or a close friend or know someone with a chronic illness have more frequent nightmares than those who are only faced with stress from school or stress from social aspects of daily life.


title: Nightmare

text: A study researching the causes of nightmares focuses on patients who have sleep apnea. The study was conducted to determine whether or not nightmares may be caused by sleep apnea, or being unable to breathe. In the nineteenth century, authors believed that nightmares were caused by not having enough oxygen, therefore it was believed that those with sleep apnea had more frequent nightmares than those without it. The results actually showed that healthy people have more nightmares than sleep apnea patients.


title: Nightmare

text: Another study supports the hypothesis. In this study, 48 patients (aged 20–85 yrs) with obstructive airways disease (OAD), including 21 with and 27 without asthma, were compared with 149 sex- and age-matched controls without respiratory disease. OAD subjects with asthma reported approximately 3 times as many nightmares as controls or OAD subjects without asthma. The evolutionary purpose of nightmares then could be a mechanism to awaken a person who is in danger.


title: Nightmare

text: Lucid-dreaming advocate Stephen LaBerge has outlined a possible reason for how dreams are formulated and why nightmares occur. To LaBerge, a dream starts with an individual thought or scene, such as walking down a dimly lit street. Since dreams are not predetermined, the brain responds to the situation by either thinking a good thought or a bad thought, and the dream framework follows from there. If bad thoughts in a dream are more prominent than good thoughts, the dream may proceed to be a nightmare.


title: Nightmare

text: There is a view, possibly featured in the story "A Christmas Carol", that eating cheese before sleep can cause nightmares, but there is little scientific evidence for this.


title: Nightmare

text: Severe nightmares are also likely to occur when person has a fever, these nightmares are often referred to as fever dreams.


title: Nightmare

text: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung seemed to have shared a belief that people frequently distressed by nightmares could be re-experiencing some stressful event from the past. Both perspectives on dreams suggest that therapy can provide relief from the dilemma of the nightmarish experience.


title: Nightmare

text: Halliday (1987) grouped treatment techniques into four classes. Direct nightmare interventions that combine compatible techniques from one or more of these classes may enhance overall treatment effectiveness:


title: Nightmare

text: Recurring post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nightmares in which traumas are re-experienced respond well to a technique called imagery rehearsal. This involves dreamers coming up with alternative, mastery outcomes to the nightmares, mentally rehearsing those outcomes while awake, and then reminding themselves at bedtime that they wish these alternate outcomes should the nightmares reoccur. Research has found that this technique not only reduces the occurrence of nightmares and insomnia, but also improves other daytime PTSD symptoms. The most common variations of imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) "relate to the number of sessions, duration of treatment, and the degree to which exposure therapy is included in the protocol".


title: Nightmare

text: Trials have included hydrocortisone, gabapentin, paroxetine, tetrahydrocannabinol, eszopiclone, xyrem, and carvedilol.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe Flash Player (known in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome as Shockwave Flash) is computer software for viewing multimedia contents, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video content created on the Adobe Flash platform. It can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or independently on supported devices. Originally created by FutureWave under the name FutureSplash Player, it was renamed to Macromedia Flash Player after Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996. It was then developed and distributed by Adobe Systems as Flash Player after Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. It is currently developed and distributed by Zhongcheng for users in China, and by Harman International for enterprise users outside of China, in collaboration with Adobe.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by Adobe Flash Professional, Adobe Flash Builder or by third-party tools such as FlashDevelop. Flash Player supports vector graphics, 3D graphics, embedded audio, video and raster graphics, and a scripting language called ActionScript, which is based on ECMAScript (similar to JavaScript) and supports object-oriented code. Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge Legacy, in Windows 8 and later, along with Google Chrome on all versions of Windows, came bundled with a sandboxed Adobe Flash plug-in.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player once had a large user base, and was a common format for web games, animations, and graphical user interface (GUI) elements embedded in web pages. Adobe stated in 2013 that more than 400 million out of over 1 billion connected desktops updated to new versions of Flash Player within six weeks of release. However, Flash Player became increasingly criticized for its performance, consumption of battery on mobile devices, the number of security vulnerabilities that had been discovered in the software, and its closed platform nature. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was highly critical of Flash Player, having published an open letter detailing Apple's reasoning for not supporting Flash on its iOS device family. Its usage also waned because of modern web standards that allow some of Flash's use cases to be fulfilled without third-party plugins. This led to the eventual deprecation of the platform by Adobe. Flash Player was officially discontinued on 31 December 2020, and its download page was removed two days later. Since 12 January 2021, Flash Player (original global variants) versions newer than 32.0.0.371, released in May 2020, refuse to play Flash content and instead display a static warning message. The software remains supported in mainland China and in some enterprise variants.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe Flash Player is a runtime that executes and displays content from a provided SWF file, although it has no in-built features to modify the SWF file at runtime. It can execute software written in the ActionScript programming language which enables the runtime manipulation of text, data, vector graphics, raster graphics, sound, and video. The player can also access certain connected hardware devices, including the web cameras and microphones, after permission for the same has been granted by the user.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player was used internally by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), to provide a cross-platform runtime environment for desktop applications and mobile applications. AIR supports installable applications on Windows, Linux, macOS, and some mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android. Flash applications must specifically be built for the AIR runtime to use additional features provided, such as file system integration, native client extensions, native window/screen integration, taskbar/dock integration, and hardware integration with connected Accelerometer and GPS devices.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player included native support for many data formats, some of which can only be accessed through the ActionScript scripting interface.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player is primarily a graphics and multimedia platform, and has supported raster graphics and vector graphics since its earliest version. It supports the following different multimedia formats which it can natively decode and play back.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Until version 10 of the Flash player, there was no support for GPU acceleration. Version 10 added a limited form of support for shaders on materials in the form of the Pixel Bender API, but still did not have GPU-accelerated 3D vertex processing. A significant change came in version 11, which added a new low-level API called Stage3D (initially codenamed Molehill), which provides full GPU acceleration, similar to WebGL. (The partial support for GPU acceleration in Pixel Bender was completely removed in Flash 11.8, resulting in the disruption of some projects like MIT's Scratch, which lacked the manpower to recode their applications quickly enough.)


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Current versions of Flash Player are optimized to use hardware acceleration for video playback and 3D graphics rendering on many devices, including desktop computers. Performance is similar to HTML5 video playback. Also, Flash Player has been used on multiple mobile devices as a primary user interface renderer.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Although code written in ActionScript 3 executes up to 10 times faster than the prior ActionScript 2, the Adobe ActionScript 3 compiler is a non-optimizing compiler, and produces inefficient bytecode in the resulting SWF, when compared to toolkits such as CrossBridge.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: CrossBridge, a toolkit that targets C++ code to run within the Flash Player, uses the LLVM compiler to produce bytecode that runs up to 10 times faster than code the ActionScript 3 compiler produces, only because the LLVM compiler uses more aggressive optimization.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe has released ActionScript Compiler 2 (ASC2) in Flex 4.7 and onwards, which improves compilation times and optimizes the generated bytecode and supports method inlining, improving its performance at runtime.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: As of 2012, the Haxe multiplatform language can build programs for Flash Player that perform faster than the same application built with the Adobe Flex SDK compiler.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: In both methods, developers can access the full Flash Player set of functions, including text, vector graphics, bitmap graphics, video, audio, camera, microphone, and others. AIR also includes added features such as file system integration, native extensions, native desktop integration, and hardware integration with connected devices.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe offers the free Adobe Gaming SDK, consisting () of several open-source AS3 libraries built on the Flash Player Stage3D APIs for GPU-accelerated graphics:


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: A few commercial game engines target Flash Player (Stage3D) as run-time environment, such as Unity 3D and Unreal Engine 3. Before the introduction of Stage3D, a number of older 2D engines or isometric engines like Flixel saw their heyday.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe also developed the CrossBridge toolkit which cross-compiles C/C++ code to run within the Flash Player, using LLVM and GCC as compiler backends, and high-performance memory-access opcodes in the Flash Player (termed "Domain Memory") to work with in-memory data quickly. CrossBridge is targeted toward the game development industry, and includes tools for building, testing, and debugging C/C++ projects in Flash Player.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Notable online video games developed in Flash include "Angry Birds", "FarmVille", and "AdventureQuest" (started in 2002, and still active as of 2020).


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: On February 22, 2012, Adobe announced that it would no longer release new versions of NPAPI Flash plugins for Linux, although Flash Player 11.2 would continue to receive security updates. In August 2016 Adobe announced that, beginning with version 24, it will resume offering of Flash Player for Linux for other browsers.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: The Extended Support Release (ESR) of Flash Player on macOS and Windows was a version of Flash Player kept up to date with security updates, but none of the new features or bug fixes available in later versions. In August 2016, Adobe discontinued the ESR branch and instead focused solely on the standard release.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Version 10 can be run under Windows 98/Me using KernelEx. HP offered Version 6 of the player for HP-UX, while Innotek GmbH offered versions 4 and 5 for OS/2. Other versions of the player have been available at some point for BeOS.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: In 2011, Flash Player had emerged as the de facto standard for online video publishing on the desktop, with adaptive bitrate video streaming, DRM, and fullscreen support. On mobile devices, however, after Apple refused to allow the Flash Player within the inbuilt iOS web browser, Adobe changed strategy, enabling Flash content to be delivered as native mobile applications using the Adobe Integrated Runtime.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Up until 2012, Flash Player 11 was available for the Android (ARM Cortex-A8 and above), although in June 2012, Google announced that Android 4.1 (codenamed Jelly Bean) would not support Flash by default. In August 2012, Adobe stopped updating Flash for Android.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player was supported on a select range of mobile and tablet devices, from Acer, BlackBerry 10, Dell, HTC, Lenovo, Logitech, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp, SoftBank, Sony (and Sony Ericsson), and Toshiba. As of 2012, Adobe has stopped browser-based Flash Player development for mobile browsers in favor of HTML5, however, Adobe continues to support Flash content on mobile devices with the Adobe Integrated Runtime, which allows developers to publish content that runs as native applications on certain supported mobile phone platforms.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe said it will optimize Flash for use on ARM architecture (ARMv7 and ARMv6 architectures used in the Cortex-A series of processors and in the ARM11 family) and release it in the second half of 2009. The company also stated it wants to enable Flash on NVIDIA Tegra, Texas Instruments OMAP 3, and Samsung ARMs. Beginning 2009, it was announced that Adobe would be bringing Flash to TV sets via Intel Media Processor CE 3100 before mid-2009. ARM Holdings later said it welcomes the move of Flash, because "it will transform mobile applications and it removes the claim that the desktop controls the Internet." However, as of May 2009, the expected ARM/Linux netbook devices had poor support for Web video and fragmented software base.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Among other devices, LeapFrog Enterprises provides Flash Player with their Leapster Multimedia Learning System and extended the Flash Player with touch-screen support. Version 9 was the most recent version available for the Linux/ARM-based Nokia 770/N800/N810 Internet tablets running Maemo OS2008. Other versions of the player have been available at some point for Symbian OS and Palm OS. The Kodak Easyshare One includes Flash Player.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Some CPU emulators have been created for Flash Player, including Chip8, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. They enable video games created for such platforms to run within Flash Player.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe announced on July 25, 2017, that it would end support for the normal/global variant of Flash Player on January 1, 2021, and encouraged developers to use HTML5 standards in place of Flash. The announcement was coordinated with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Adobe announced that all major web browsers planned to officially remove the Adobe Flash Player component on December 31, 2020, and Microsoft removed it from the Windows OS in January 2021 via Windows Update. In a move to further reduce the number of Flash Player installations, Adobe added a "time bomb" to Flash to disable existing installations after January 12, 2021. In mid-2020, Flash Player started prompting users to uninstall itself. Adobe removed all existing download links for Flash installers. After January 26, 2021, all major web browsers including Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox have already permanently removed Flash support. However, Flash content continues to be accessible on the web through emulators such as Ruffle, with varying degrees of compatibility and performance, although this is not endorsed by Adobe.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Starting from Chrome 76, Flash is disabled by default without any prompts to activate Flash content. Users who wanted to play Flash content had to manually set a browser to prompt for Flash content, and then during each browser session enable Flash plugin for every site individually. Microsoft Edge, which is based on Chromium, followed the same plan as Google Chrome.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Google Chrome blocked the Flash plugin as "out of date" in January 2021, and fully removed it from the browser with Chrome version 88, released on January 20, 2021.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Starting with Firefox 85, Flash is disabled by default without any prompts to activate Flash content. To play Flash content, users had to manually set a browser to prompt for Flash content, and then during each browser session enable Flash plugin for every site individually. Firefox 85, released on January 26, 2021, completely removed support for the Flash plugin. Firefox ESR dropped support on November 2, 2021 (Firefox 78 ESR was the last version with support).


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: On October 27, 2020, Microsoft released an update (named KB4577586) for Windows 10 and 8.1 which removes the embedded Adobe Flash Player component from IE11 and Edge Legacy. In July 2021, this update was automatically installed as a security patch. However, an ActiveX Flash Player plugin may still be used with IE after this update is applied.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Apple dropped Flash Player support from Safari 14 alongside the release of macOS Big Sur.<ref name="dropped in Safari/macOS"></ref>


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Despite the years of notice, several websites still were using Flash following December 31, 2020, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of these were resolved in the weeks after the deadline. However, many educational institutions still relied on Flash for educational material and did not have a path forward for replacement.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: The China-specific variant of Flash will be supported beyond 2020, by a company known as Zhongcheng. The Projector (standalone) versions of this variant also work outside of China and do not include the "Flash Helper Service"; however, some tracking code still seems to be present. They are available on a somewhat hidden "Debug" page. In addition, as the global variant of the plugin was discontinued, some users have figured how to modify and repack the China-specific variant to bring it more in line with the global variant. This includes removing the "Flash Helper Service" and removing the China only installation restriction, along with all other geo-restrictions and tracking code. A "time bomb", similar to the one found in later versions of the global variant, is also present in the unmodified China variant; this is also removed in most repacks. In theory, these repacks should provide users outside of China with the latest security updates to Flash Player, without having to deal with invasive advertisements or worry about privacy risks. One such project, "Clean Flash Installer", was served a DMCA takedown from Adobe in October 2021.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe has partnered with Harman to support enterprise Flash Player users until at least 2023. The Harman Flash player variant is labeled as version 50.x, to avoid confusion with other variants.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Internet Explorer 11, along with IE mode in Edge, will continue with ActiveX support, and by extension Flash Player support. Firefox forks that plan to continue NPAPI support, and by extension Flash Player support, include Waterfox, Basilisk, Pale Moon, and K-Meleon. Various Chromium-based Chinese browsers will also continue to support Flash Player in PPAPI and/or NPAPI form, including, but not limited to, 360 Secure Browser.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Shortly after Flash EOL, South African Revenue Service (SARS) released a custom version of Chromium browser with the Adobe Flash Player "time bomb" removed. This browser can access only a small set of SARS online pages containing Flash-based forms required for filing financial reports.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Although no longer available directly from Adobe, all versions of Adobe Flash Player Projector (also known as Adobe Flash Player Standalone) lack the "time bomb" present in the newer plug-in variants, and thus continue to be able to play all supported Flash file formats, including SWF files, without modification.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: The Internet Archive hosts some Flash content and makes it playable in modern browsers via emulators, Ruffle and Emularity. Other emulators, such as CheerpX, also exist as options for Flash Player emulation on other websites. BlueMaxima's Flashpoint project claims to have collected more than 38,000 Adobe Flash Player games and animations and made them available for download.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe has released some components of Adobe Flash products as open source software via Open Screen Project or donated them to open source organizations. As of 2021, most of these technologies are considered obsolete. This includes: ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) which implements ActionScript 3 (donated as open-source to Mozilla Foundation), Adobe Flex Framework (donated as open-source to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache Flex, superseded by Apache Royale), CrossBridge C++ cross-compilation toolset (released on GitHub).


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: In some browsers, prior Flash versions have had to be uninstalled before an updated version could be installed. However, as of version 11.2 for Windows, there are now automatic updater options. Linux is partially supported, as Adobe is cooperating with Google to implement it via Chrome web browser on all Linux platforms.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Mixing Flash applications with HTML leads to inconsistent input handling leading to poor user experience with the site (keyboard and mouse not working as they would in an HTML-only document).


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player supports persistent local storage of data (also referred to as Local Shared Objects), which can be used similarly to HTTP cookies or Web Storage in web applications. Local storage in Flash Player allows websites to store non-executable data on a user's computer, such as authentication information, game high scores or web browser games, server-based session identifiers, site preferences, saved work, or temporary files. Flash Player will only allow content originating from exactly the same website domain to access data saved in local storage.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Because local storage can be used to save information on a computer that is later retrieved by the same site, a site can use it to gather user statistics, similar to how HTTP cookies and Web Storage can be used. With such technologies, the possibility of building a profile based on user statistics is considered by some a potential privacy concern. Users can disable or restrict use of local storage in Flash Player through a "Settings Manager" page. These settings can be accessed from the Adobe website or by right-clicking on Flash-based content and selecting "Global Settings".


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Local storage can be disabled entirely or on a site-by-site basis. Disabling local storage will block any content from saving local user information using Flash Player, but this may disable or reduce the functionality of some websites, such as saved preferences or high scores and saved progress in games.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player 10.1 and upward honor the privacy mode settings in the latest versions of the Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari web browsers, such that no local storage data is saved when the browser's privacy mode is in use.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Adobe security bulletins and advisories announce security updates, but Adobe Flash Player release notes do not disclose the security issues addressed when a release closes security holes, making it difficult to evaluate the urgency of a particular update. A version test page allows the user to check if the latest version is installed, and uninstallers may be used to ensure that old-version plugins have been uninstalled from all installed browsers.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: In February 2010, Adobe officially apologized for not fixing a known vulnerability for over a year. In June 2010 Adobe announced a "critical vulnerability" in recent versions, saying there are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Later, in October 2010, Adobe announced another critical vulnerability, this time also affecting Android-based mobile devices. Android users have been recommended to disable Flash or make it only on demand. Subsequent security vulnerabilities also exposed Android users, such as the two critical vulnerabilities published in February 2013 or the four critical vulnerabilities published in March 2013, all of which could lead to arbitrary code execution.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report states that a remote code execution in Adobe Reader and Flash Player was the second most attacked vulnerability in 2009. The same report also recommended using browser extensions to disable Flash Player usage on untrusted websites. McAfee predicted that Adobe software, especially Reader and Flash, would be primary target for attacks in 2010. Adobe applications had become, at least at some point, the most popular client-software targets for attackers during the last quarter of 2009. The Kaspersky Security Network published statistics for the third quarter of 2012 showing that 47.5% of its users were affected by one or more critical vulnerabilities. The report also highlighted that "Flash Player vulnerabilities enable cybercriminals to bypass security systems integrated into the application."


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Steve Jobs criticized the security of Flash Player, noting that "Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009". Adobe responded by pointing out that "the Symantec Global Internet Threat Report for 2009, found that Flash Player had the second lowest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed (which included both web plug-ins and browsers)."


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: On April 7, 2016, Adobe released a Flash Player patch for a zero-day memory corruption vulnerability that could be used to deliver malware via the Magnitude exploit kit. The vulnerability could be exploited for remote code execution.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Flash Player 11.2 does not play certain kinds of content unless it has been digitally signed by Adobe, following a license obtained by the publisher directly from Adobe.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: This move by Adobe, together with the abandonment of Flex to Apache was criticized as a way to lock out independent tool developers, in favor of Adobe's commercial tools.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: This has been resolved as of January 2013, after Adobe no longer requires a license or royalty from the developer. All premium features are now classified as general availability, and can be freely used by Flash applications.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: In April 2010, Steve Jobs, at the time CEO of Apple Inc. published an open letter explaining why Apple would not support Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. In the letter he blamed problems with the "openness", stability, security, performance, and touchscreen integration of the Flash Player as reasons for refusing to support it. He also claimed that when one of Apple's Macintosh computers crashes, "more often than not" the cause can be attributed to Flash, and described Flash as "buggy". Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen responded by saying, "If Flash [is] the number one reason that Macs crash, which I'm not aware of, it has as much to do with the Apple operating system."


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Steve Jobs also claimed that a large percentage of the video on the Internet is supported on iOS, since many popular video sharing websites such as YouTube have published video content in an HTML5 compatible format, enabling videos to playback in mobile web browsers even without Flash Player.


title: Adobe Flash Player

text: Starting with version 30, Adobe stopped distributing Flash Player directly to users from mainland China. Instead, they selected 2144.cn as a partner and released a special variant of Flash Player on a specific website, which contains a non-closable process, known as the "Flash Helper Service", that collects private information and pops up advertisement window contents, by receiving and running encrypted programs from a remote server. The partnership started in about 2017, but in version 30, Adobe disabled the usage of vanilla (global) variant of Flash Player in mainland China, forcing users to use that specific variant, which may pose a risk to its users due to Internet censorship by Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This only affected Chinese Chromium based browser users, Firefox users, and Internet Explorer users using Windows 7 and below, as Microsoft still directly distributed Flash Player for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge through Windows Update in Windows 8 and upward at the time. Starting in 2021, however, this variant is the only publicly supported version of Flash Player.


title: Louis Till

text: Louis Till (February 7, 1922 – July 2, 1945) was an American soldier. He was the father of Emmett Till, whose murder in August 1955 at the age of 14 galvanized the civil rights movement. Till was court-martialed on two counts of rape and one count of murder in Italy in 1945 while serving in the U.S. Army and was executed by hanging. The circumstances of his death were unknown to his family until they were revealed after the trial of his son's murderers ten years later.


title: Louis Till

text: Louis Till grew up an orphan in New Madrid, Missouri. As a young man he worked at the Argo Corn Company and was an amateur boxer. At age 17, Till began courting Mamie Carthan, a girl of the same age. Her parents disapproved, thinking the charismatic Till was "too sophisticated" for their daughter. At her mother's insistence, Mamie broke off their courtship, but the persistent Till won out, and they married on October 14, 1940 when both were 18. Their only child, Emmett Louis Till, was born on July 25, 1941. Mamie left her husband soon after learning that he had been unfaithful. Louis, enraged, choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. Eventually Mamie obtained a restraining order against him. After he repeatedly violated this order, a judge forced Till to choose between enlistment in the United States Army and imprisonment. Choosing the former, he enlisted in 1943.


title: Louis Till

text: While serving in the Italian Campaign, Till was arrested by Military Police, who suspected him and soldier Fred A. McMurray of the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others in Civitavecchia. A third soldier was granted immunity in exchange for testimony against McMurray and Till. After a short investigation, he and McMurray were court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa on July 2, 1945. Both soldiers had pleaded innocent; their defense team offered no evidence in support of their innocence, and Till stayed silent during the trial. Before the execution, Till was imprisoned alongside American poet Ezra Pound, who had been imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis and Italian Fascists; he is mentioned in lines 171–173 of Canto 74 of Pound's "Pisan Cantos":


title: Louis Till

text: Till was buried in the Naples Allied Cemetery. In 1948, his remains were moved to the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery Plot E.


title: Louis Till

text: The circumstances of Till's death were not revealed to his family; Mamie Till was told only that her husband's death was due to "willful misconduct". Her attempts to learn more were comprehensively blocked by the United States Army bureaucracy. The full details of Louis Till's criminal charges and execution emerged only ten years later. On August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, after allegedly making advances towards Carolyn Bryant, a local white woman. (Years later, a historian stated that Bryant disclosed to him that she had fabricated testimony that Till made verbal or physical advances towards her in the store. However, the family of Bryant has disputed this claim.) Her husband and brother-in-law abducted Till and tortured him to death, then threw his body into the river. Both were arrested a few days later, charged with and tried for first-degree murder, but were acquitted by an all-white jury in September 1955.


title: Louis Till

text: In October 1955, after the murder trial and acquittal gained international media attention, Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C. Stennis uncovered details about Louis Till's crimes and execution and released them to reporters. In November 1955, a grand jury declined to indict the two abductors for kidnapping Till despite the fact that they had given a magazine interview in which they admitted to having kidnapped Till.


title: Louis Till

text: The Southern media extensively covered the story. Various editorials claimed that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the "Yankee" media had lied about the record of Emmett Till's father. Many of these editorials specifically cited an article in "Life" magazine, which presented Louis Till as having died fighting for his country in France. According to historians, "Life" magazine was an exception rather than the rule, and no other "northern" media had lionized Pvt. Till or embellished his record; additionally, "Life" later published a retraction. However, the impression was left among some southerners that the erroneous "Life" article was representative of the Northern media in general. Several other Southern editorials went so far as to associate Emmett Till with his father's crimes. They implied that Emmett may have attempted rape after the fashion of his father, thereby justifying his murder.


title: Louis Till

text: In 2016, notable African-American novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman explored the circumstances leading to and including the military conviction of Louis Till. In the partly fictional book "Writing to Save a Life – The Louis Till File", Wideman examined the trial record and compared it to the trial of Emmett's killers, calling both of them "A farce", and believes that Mr. Till's military records being leaked during 1955 was an intentional effort to further demonize Emmett Till and retroactively justify the acquittal of his murderers. Wideman expresses the viewpoint that Louis Till may have been punished for the "Crime of being (Black)", rather than for committing any real crimes, citing the disproportionate punishment of African-American soldiers for rape as well as laws in the United States that defined all sexual encounters between African-American men and white women as rape.


title: Louis Till

text: Wideman's analysis of Till's murder trial alleged one of its witness insisted that the killer was a white person before recanting their statement, and in Till's rape trial, both victims said that they were assaulted in darkness and could not identify their attackers, declining to label Till or his co-defendant as suspects. Wideman believed that their execution, due to these inconsistencies, was racially motivated.


title: Louis Till

text: However, in "The Fifth Field: The Story of the 96 American Soldiers Sentenced to Death and Executed in Europe and North Africa in World War II" (Schiffer Publishing, 2013) author Colonel French L. MacLean, US Army Retired, had access to the complete court-martial record of the case to include witness statements and found that a Private James Thomas, who was tried separately, made a statement that he watched Louis Till and co-defendant Fred McMurray take 20 minutes to plan the home invasion; he stated that the men wore US Navy weather masks; he stated Till and McMurray had sex with the two women, both of whom had miscarriages later (one had been 8 months pregnant.) Investigators found a letter envelope at the scene of the crime addressed to Fred McMurray. McMurray made a statement at trial that just before the attack, Till said, "Everybody follow me: If anybody turns back I'll blast him." McMurray, who was also on trial, said that begged Till not to shoot, but Till fired a shot into the house anyway: Signora Anna Zanchi was shot in the stomach and died several hours later at a U.S. Army hospital. Colonel Claudius O. Wolfe, the Staff Judge Advocate for the Peninsula Base Section (PBS) in Italy, reported that the record of trial was legally sufficient to support the findings of guilty. Brigadier General Francis H. Oxx, the Commander of the PBS, approved the findings. Colonel Adam Richmond, the Mediterranean Theater Judge Advocate, found no significant discrepancies and recommended that the sentence for each of the accused be confirmed. General Joseph T. McNarney, Commanding General of the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO), confirmed the sentences for both men; Judge Advocates Irion, Sessions and Remick of the Branch Office of The JAG with the MTO found the trial to have been satisfactory and that Private Thomas' testimony had been corroborated in most of its important aspects.


title: Louis Till

text: Ollie Gordon, one of Emmett Till's cousins, was recorded visiting Louis Till's grave in France for the final episode of the ABC documentary series "Let the World See", which aired in January of 2022. References Wideman's analysis of Till's murder and rape trails, she said "He's laying in this less than honorable area for a crime that we're still not sure that he committed".


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder Ali ( حیدر علی, "Haidarālī"; 1720 – 7 December 1782) was the Sultan and "de facto" ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in southern India. Born as Hyder Ali, he distinguished himself as a soldier, eventually drawing the attention of Mysore's rulers. Rising to the post of Dalavayi (commander-in-chief) to Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, he came to dominate the titular monarch and the Mysore government. He became the de facto ruler of Mysore as Sarvadhikari (Chief Minister) by 1761.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Though illiterate, Hyder Ali concluded an alliance with the French, and used the services of French workmen in raising his artillery and arsenal. His rule of Mysore was characterised by frequent warfare with his neighbours and rebellion within his territories. This was not unusual for the time as much of the Indian subcontinent was then in turmoil. He left his eldest son, Tipu Sultan, an extensive kingdom bordered by the Krishna River in the north, the Eastern Ghats in the east and the Arabian Sea in the west.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The exact date of Hyder Ali's birth is not known with certainty. He was born to Fath Muhammad. Various historical sources provide dates ranging between 1717 and 1722 for his birth. There are also some variations in reports of his ancestry. According to some accounts, his grandfather was descended from a line tracing their lineage back to Baghdad, while another traces his lineage instead to the area of present-day Afghanistan In a third account, written by one of his French military officers, Hyder himself claimed descent from the Bani Hashim clan of the Quraysh. His father, Fath Muhammad, was born in Kolar, and served as a commander of 50 men in the bamboo rocket artillery (mainly used for signalling) in the army of the Nawab of Carnatic. Fath Muhammad eventually entered the service of the Wodeyar Rajas of the Kingdom of Mysore, where he rose to become a powerful military commander. The Wodeyars awarded him Budikote as a jagir (land grant), where he then served as Naik (Lord).


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder Ali was born in Budikote, Kolar district; he was Fath Muhammad's fifth child, and the second by his third wife. His early years are not well documented; he entered military service along with his brother Shahbaz after their father died in combat. After serving for a number of years under the rulers of Arcot, they came to Srirangapatna, where Hyder's uncle served. He introduced them to Devaraja, the "dalwai" (chief minister, military leader, and virtual ruler) of Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, and his brother Nanjaraja, who also held important ministerial posts. hyder and his brother were both given commands in the Mysorean army; Hyder served under Shahbaz, commanding 100 cavalry and 2,000 infantry.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In 1748, Qamar-ud-din Khan, Asaf Jah I, the longtime Nizam of Hyderabad, died. The struggle to succeed him is known as the Second Carnatic War, and pitted Asaf Jah's son Nasir Jung against a nephew, Muzaffar Jung.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Devaraja had started vesting more military authority in his brother, and in 1749 Nanjaraja marched the Mysorean army in support of Nasir Jung. The army went to Devanhalli, where the Mysoreans participated in the Siege of Devanahalli Fort.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The fort was held by Muzaffar Jung's forces and the siege was conducted by the Marquis de Bussy. During the successful eight-month siege, Hyder Ali and his brother distinguished themselves, and were rewarded by the dalwai with enlarged commands.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Although Hyder Ali was from Mysore his early loyalties were to the "Nizam of Hyderabad", though whom Hyder Ali and his companions became Sepoys in the Deccan with partial investiture from the "Great Moghul" of that period.


title: Hyder Ali

text: By 1755 Hyder Ali commanded 3,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry, and was reported to be enriching himself on campaigns by plunder. In that year he was also appointed Faujdar (military commander) of Dindigul. In this position he first retained French advisers to organise and train his artillery companies. He is also known to have personally served alongside de Bussy, and is believed to have met both Muzaffar Jung and Chanda Shahib.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In these early wars he also came to dislike and mistrust Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah, the Nawab of the Carnatic. In fact Muhammed Ali Khan Wallajah and the Mysorean leaders were long at odds with each other, seeking territorial gains at the other's expense. Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah had by then formed an alliance with the British, and he was accused by Hyder Ali in later years of effectively preventing him from making any sort of long-lasting alliances or agreements with the British.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Throughout the Carnatic Wars, Hyder Ali and his Mysore battalions served alongside French commanders such as Joseph Francois Dupleix, Count de Lally and de Bussy, he also assisted Chanda Sahib on various occasions. Hyder Ali supported the claims of Muzaffar Jung and later sided with Salabat Jung.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Early in his career, Hyder Ali retained as one of his chief financial assistants a Brahmin named Khande Rao. Hyder Ali, who was illiterate, was reported to be blessed with a prodigious memory and numerical acumen.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder Ali could rival or outperform expert accountants with his great arithmetic skills and worked to develop a system, with Rao, that included checks and balances so sophisticated that all manner of income, including plunder of physical goods of all types, could be accounted for with little possibility for fraud or embezzlement.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In 1757 Hyder Ali was called to Srirangapatna to support Devaraja against threats from Hyderabad and the Marathas. Upon his arrival he found the Mysorean army in disarray and near mutiny over pay. While Devaraja bought his way out of the threats to Srirangapatna, Hyder Ali arranged for the army to be paid and arrested the ringleaders of the mutiny.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In 1757, to resist the invasion of the Zamorin of Calicut, the Palakkad Raja sought the help of Hyder Ali. Hyder Ali then led campaigns against the Zamorin of Calicut in the Malabar Coast of India. In 1766, Hyder Ali defeated the Zamorin of Kozhikode – an East India Company ally at the time – and absorbed Kozhikode into his state. The smaller princely states in northern and north-central parts of modern-day state of Kerala (Malabar region) including Kolathunadu, Kottayam, Kadathanadu, Kozhikode, Tanur, Valluvanad, and Palakkad were unified under the rulers of Mysore and were made a part of the larger Kingdom of Mysore. For his role in these activities Hyder Ali was rewarded by Devaraja with the jaghir (regional governorship) of Bangalore.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In 1758 Hyder Ali successfully forced the Marathas to lift a siege of Bangalore. Hyder Ali's forces entered the city, thus capturing it.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The young King of Mysore Krishnaraja Wodeyar II rewarded Hyder Ali's performance by granting him the title of "Fath Hyder Bahadur" or "Nawab Hyder Ali Khan". Hyder Ali is also known to be the first ruler of Mysore to be granted the title of Nawab, thus it can be said that he was briefly the "Nawab of Mysore" by 1759.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Because of the ongoing conflicts with the Marathas the Mysorean treasury was virtually bankrupted, prompting the queen mother to force into exile Nanjaraj, who had assumed the position of dalwai upon his brother's death in 1758. Hyder Ali was a beneficiary of this action, rising in influence in the court.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In 1760 the queen mother conspired with Khande Rao, who had gone into the raja's service, to oust Hyder Ali. He was precipitously forced out of Seringapatam, leaving his family, including his son Tipu Sultan, under house arrest.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The sudden departure left Hyder Ali with few resources. He may have been fortuitously aided at this time by the faraway Third Battle of Panipat, in which the Marathas suffered a major defeat, Jan 1761. Because of this loss, the Marathas withdrew forces from Mysore and Hyder Ali's brother-in-law Makdum Ali chased them into Bidnur and Sunda.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder Ali soon consolidated his strength by placing Mirza Sahib as the commander of Sira, Ibrahim Ali Khan in Bangalore and Amin Sahib his cousin in Basnagar. Soon afterward Hyder Ali marched alongside Makdum Ali's forces, which numbered about 6,000, along with the 3,000 men from his garrison at Bangalore, toward Seringapatam.


title: Hyder Ali

text: They clashed with Khande Rao's forces before reaching the capital. Khande Rao, with 11,000 men, won the battle, and Hyder Ali was forced to apply to the exiled Nanjaraj for support. Nanjaraj gave him command of his army, and the title of Dalwai.


title: Hyder Ali

text: With this force Hyder Ali again moved out against Khande Rao. The two armies faced each other again, but a deception by Hyder Ali convinced Khande Rao to flee instead of engaging in battle. Hyder Ali sent letters appearing to be from Nanjaraj to some of Khande Rao's commanders, confirming their agreement to hand Khande Rao over to Hyder Ali. Fearing a conspiracy, Khande Rao fled into Seringapatam.


title: Hyder Ali

text: After a minor battle against the now-leaderless army, Hyder Ali took over most of its remnants and surrounded Seringapatam. The ensuing negotiations left Hyder Ali in nearly complete military control of Mysore. Concessions that he extracted included the surrender of Khande Rao, who Hyder Ali imprisoned in Bangalore.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder Ali became king of Mysore in 1761 after overthrowing the prime minister and making the king, Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, a prisoner in his own palace.


title: Hyder Ali

text: As Hyder Ali's control progressed, the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II became the pensioner of the East India Company by the year 1765.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder Ali formally styled himself "Sultan Hyder Ali Khan" in his correspondence with the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II. Hyder Ali retained his title during the first Anglo-Mysore War that raged in 1766, and onwards.


title: Hyder Ali

text: He was very cautious in his diplomacy with the Nizam of Hyderabad, who was, according to an official Mughal "firman", the sovereign of all Muslim-ruled territories in southern India.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The English and the Marathas continued to refer to Hyder Ali and later his son Tipu Sultan as "Nabobs".


title: Hyder Ali

text: Over the next few years Hyder expanded his territories to the north. Two key acquisitions were Sira, taken from the Marathas, and the kingdom of Bednore, where as a "casus belli" he agreed to support a claimant to its throne against usurpers. In 1763 he took its capital, Ikkeri, which included a large treasury. He renamed the capital Haidernagar, and began styling himself "Hyder Ali Khan Bahadur", a title that had been bestowed on him by Salabat Jung as reward for his taking of Sira. He moved most of his family to Ikkeri, a natural fortress, in the hopes that it would "serve him for a safe refuge". He assumed the trappings of the ruler of Bednore, began issuing coins, and established a system of weights and measures. He made sure his son Tipu received a quality education, "employing learned tutors" and "appointing a suitable hand of attendants" to see to his upbringing. He cultivated a suspicion of foreigners, specifically refusing to allow the East India Company to have a resident at his court. His security, however, was not assured in Bednore: a bout of illness and a widespread conspiracy against him convinced him that it would not make an ideal capital for his domain, and he returned to Mysore.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The taking of Bednore included several ports on the Malabar coast, including Mangalore. Hyder used these ports to establish a small navy. The documentary record on the navy is fragmentary; Portuguese records indicate that the fleet was launched sometime between 1763 and 1765. It was apparently officered by Europeans, and its first admiral was an Englishman; by 1768 its admiral was a Mysorean cavalry officer named Ali Bey (or Lutf Ali Beg), apparently chosen by Hyder because he did not trust the European captains.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Hyder had amicable relations with the Christian population in Mangalore, which had long been under Portuguese influence and had a sizeable Roman Catholic population, and with Christians in general. He had a very close friendship with two Goan Catholic clergymen, Bishop Noronha and Fr. Joachim Miranda, and allowed a Protestant missionary to live at his court. Hyder's army also included Catholic soldiers, and he allowed Christians to build a church at Seringapatam, where French generals used to offer prayers and priests used to visit. Mangalorean historian A. L. P. D'Souza mentions that Hyder also had Christians in his administration. Pursuant to treaties concluded with the Portuguese, he also allowed Portuguese priests to settle disputes among Christians. However, many Mangaloreans (not just Christians) disliked him for the heavy tax burden he imposed on them.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The Maratha Confederacy had just been routed at the Third Battle of Panipat by Ahmad Shah Durrani and the Mughals had been restored in the year 1761.


title: Hyder Ali

text: The Maratha Empire was most vulnerable and feeble to any attack and the Peshwa's power had been almost eliminated in all of India.


title: Hyder Ali

text: At this point in his life Hyder Ali decided to go to war with the Marathas and put an end to the threat they posed to his power.


title: Hyder Ali

text: He therefore attacked the Maratha aligned Rani of Bednore. She had appealed to the Nawab of Savanur for assistance when Hyder invaded. Hyder consequently threatened the Nawab, attempting to extort tribute from him. Failing in this, he overran that territory, reaching as far as Dharwad, north of the Tungabhadra River.


title: Hyder Ali

text: Since Savanur was a tributary of the Marathas, the Peshwa Madhavrao I countered with a strong force, and defeated Hyder near Rattihalli. Following the victory the Marathas restored their power under the reign of Madhavrao Peshwa. The Maratha victory forced Hyder to retreat; he had to abandon Bednore, although he was able to remove its treasures to Seringapatam. Hyder paid 35 lakhs rupees in tribute to end the war, and returned most of his gains, although he did retain Sira.


title: Hyder Ali

text: In 1766 Hyder Ali returned to the Malabar, this time at the invitation of the raja of Cannanore, who sought independence from the Zamorin, the ruler of Calicut who held sway over Cannanore. Hyder also claimed a debt of tribute from the Zamorin, who had supported Hyder's opponents in earlier campaigns. After a difficult campaign, Hyder reached Calicut, where the Zamorin, after promising to make payment, failed to deliver. Hyder placed the Zamorin under house arrest and had his finance minister tortured. Fearing similar treatment, the Zamorin set fire to his palace and perished in the flames, ending Eradi dynastic rule of Calicut. After establishing control of Calicut, Hyder departed, but was forced to return several months later when the Nairs rebelled against the rule of his lieutenant, Reza Sahib. Hyder's response was harsh: after putting down the rebellion, many rebels were executed, and thousands of others were forcibly relocated to the Mysorean highlands.