title: Verdine White

text: Verdine Adams White (born July 25, 1951) is an American musician, best known as a founding member and bassist for the band Earth, Wind & Fire. White was placed at No. 19 on Rolling Stone's list of The 50 Greatest Bassists of All Time.


title: Verdine White

text: Verdine was born Verdine Adams, Jr. in Chicago, Illinois, on July 25, 1951. His father, Verdine Sr., was a doctor who also played the saxophone. He grew up listening to recordings of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and other jazz musicians. He was also influenced by Cleveland Eaton, The Beatles, the Motown sound, and his two drummer brothers, Fred and Maurice. When he was 15, he saw a double bass in his high school orchestra class and decided that he wanted to play bass.


title: Verdine White

text: He soon got a red electric bass and, taking the advice of brother Maurice and his father, took private lessons from Radi Velah of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, learning the Billè double bass method, and on weekends learned the electric bass with Chess Records session bassist and trombonist Louis Satterfield, who would later become a member of Earth, Wind & Fire's famed horn section, The Phenix Horns. Verdine says he learned everything about the bass guitar from Louis Satterfield, and some of his early bass influences were James Jamerson, Paul McCartney, and Gary Karr.


title: Verdine White

text: Moving toward a newly bought Fender Telecaster Bass instead of the upright bass, Verdine began working the Chicago club scene with local bands. Meanwhile, brother Maurice, who was a former session drummer at Chess Records and a member of pianist Ramsey Lewis' trio, had formed the Salty Peppers, scoring a local hit that caught the ears of Capitol Records.


title: Verdine White

text: In early 1970 Maurice moved to Los Angeles, hoping to record the group, which he had renamed Earth, Wind & Fire and called up Verdine asking whether he would like to join, which he did, arriving in Los Angeles on June 6, 1970.


title: Verdine White

text: As Earth, Wind & Fire's bassist since the band's inception, White has won six and received two honoree Grammy Awards, has been Grammy nominated eighteen times and has also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame to name a few honors. The band has also earned more than 50 gold and platinum albums and have sold over 90 million albums worldwide.


title: Verdine White

text: In November 2008 White was presented with "Bass Player" magazine's Lifetime Achievement Award by Nathan East. On Friday, February 26, 2010 Verdine was inducted as a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity at the ceremony held at the Crowne Plaza Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Verdine White holds an honorary doctorate degree from the American Conservatory of Music.


title: Verdine White

text: On July 2, 2020, Rolling Stone Australia Magazine ranked White number 19 on "The 50 Greatest Bassists of All Time".


title: Verdine White

text: White's credits as a songwriter date back to Earth, Wind & Fire's self-titled debut studio album, on which White co-wrote "C'mon Children" and "Bad Tune". White co-wrote three songs on their third album, "Last Days and Time". He had one writing credit on their fourth album, "Head To The Sky". On their fifth album, "Open Our Eyes", White co-wrote the group's first top 5 R&B/Soul hit (No. 4), "Mighty, Mighty" along with his brother Maurice. They also co-wrote, "Kalimba Story", a top 10 R&B/Soul hit (No. 6). These two songs along with their single, "Devotion" (No. 23), helped the album top Billboard's Soul Album Chart, given them their first No. 1 album. White's co-writes include some of Earth, Wind & Fire's biggest hits, such as "That's the Way of the World".


title: Verdine White

text: White is credited on many artist's songs as heard in commercials, movie soundtracks, and televisions shows.


title: Verdine White

text: White is the co-founder and director of the Verdine White Foundation, which aims to provide musical education to underprivileged and gifted students. During 2007 he was as well inducted into the Boys and Girls Club's Alumni Hall of Fame.


title: Verdine White

text: White is the founder of the non profit organization, The Verdine White Performing Arts Center (VWPAC), located in Los Angeles. Founded in 2010, VWPAC encourages students to reach their fullest potential as artists and people, equipped with a well-rounded performing arts education and the confidence to take on whatever path they choose within the arts.


title: Verdine White

text: In 2012, White co-authored a book with Louis Satterfield, "Playing Bass Guitar, A Beginner's Guide To The Electric Bass".


title: Verdine White

text: Verdine White lives in Los Angeles in a house built in 1919, with his wife of 40 years Shelly Clark. She was once a member of R&B groups The Ikettes and Honey Cone. They have a son and a granddaughter. He also has a twin sister by the name of Geraldine. He is the younger half-brother of Earth, Wind, and Fire band founder Maurice White and older brother of drummer Fred White and Monte White, (October 16, 1953 - April 21, 2020). Both were members of Earth, Wind & Fire. Fred played drums and percussion as a band member from 1974 to 1984 and was inducted with the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Monte served as the group's tour manager from 1974 to 1984.


title: Danaë

text: In Greek mythology, Danaë (, ; ; , ) was an Argive princess and mother of the hero Perseus by Zeus. She was credited with founding the city of Ardea in Latium during the Bronze Age.


title: Danaë

text: Danae was the daughter and only child of King Acrisius of Argos by his wife Queen Eurydice or Aganippe. In some accounts, she had a sister, Evarete, wife of King Oenomaus of Pisa and mother of Hippodamia.


title: Danaë

text: Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, King Acrisius asked the oracle of Delphi if this would change. The oracle announced to him that he would never have a son, but his daughter would, and that he would be killed by his daughter's son. At the time, Danaë was childless and, meaning to keep her so, King Acrisius shut her up in a bronze chamber to be constructed under the court of his palace (other versions say she was imprisoned in a tall brass tower with a single richly adorned chamber, but with no doors or windows, just a sky-light as the source of light and air). She was buried in this tomb, never to see the light again. However, Zeus, the king of the gods, desired her, and came to her in the form of golden rain which streamed in through the roof of the subterranean chamber and down into her womb. Soon after, their child Perseus was born.


title: Danaë

text: Unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods or the Furies by killing his offspring and grandchild, King Acrisius cast Danaë and Perseus into the sea in a wooden chest. The sea was calmed by Poseidon and, at the request of Zeus, the pair survived. They were washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by Dictys—the brother of King Polydectes—who raised Perseus to manhood. The King was charmed by Danaë, but she had no interest in him. Consequently, he agreed not to marry her only if her son would bring him the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Using Athena's shield, Hermes's winged sandals and Hades's helmet of invisibility, Perseus was able to evade Medusa's gaze and decapitate her.


title: Danaë

text: Later, after Perseus brought back Medusa's head and rescued Andromeda, the oracle's prophecy came true. He started for Argos, but learning of the prophecy, instead went to Larissa, where athletic games were being held. By chance, an aging Acrisius was there and Perseus accidentally struck him on the head with his javelin (or discus), fulfilling the prophecy.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Earl Eugene Scruggs (January 6, 1924 – March 28, 2012) was an American musician noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo picking style, now called "Scruggs style", which is a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. His three-finger style of playing was radically different from the traditional way the five-string banjo had previously been played. This new style of playing became popular and elevated the banjo from its previous role as a background rhythm instrument to featured solo status. He popularized the instrument across several genres of music.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Scruggs' career began at age 21 when he was hired to play in Bill Monroe's band, the Blue Grass Boys. The name "bluegrass" eventually became the eponym for the entire genre of country music now known by that title. Despite considerable success with Monroe, performing on the Grand Ole Opry and recording classic hits such as "Blue Moon of Kentucky", Scruggs resigned from the group in 1946 because of their exhausting touring schedule. Fellow band member Lester Flatt resigned as well, and he and Scruggs later paired up in the duo Flatt and Scruggs. Scruggs' banjo instrumental, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown", was released in 1949 and became an enduring hit. The song experienced a rebirth of popularity to a younger generation when it was featured in the 1967 film "Bonnie and Clyde". The song won two Grammy Awards and, in 2005, was selected for the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry of works of unusual merit.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Flatt and Scruggs brought bluegrass music into mainstream popularity in the early 1960s with their country hit, "The Ballad of Jed Clampett"—the theme music for the television sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies"—the first Scruggs recording to reach number one on the Billboard charts. Over their 20-year association, Flatt and Scruggs recorded over 50 albums and 75 singles. The duo broke up in 1969, chiefly because, while Scruggs wanted to switch styles to fit a more modern sound, Flatt was a traditionalist who opposed the change and believed doing so would alienate a fan base of bluegrass purists. Although each of them formed a new band to match their visions, neither of them ever regained the success they had achieved as a team.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Scruggs received four Grammy awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a National Medal of Arts. He became a member of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1985, Flatt and Scruggs were inducted together into the Country Music Hall of Fame and named, as a duo, number 24 on CMT's "40 Greatest Men of Country Music". Scruggs was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honor in the folk and traditional arts in the United States. Four works by Scruggs have been placed in the Grammy Hall of Fame. After Scruggs' death in 2012 at age 88, the Earl Scruggs Center was founded in Shelby, North Carolina, near his birthplace with the aid of a federal grant and corporate donors. The center is a $5.5 million facility that features the musical contributions of Scruggs and serves as an educational center providing classes and field trips for students.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Earl Scruggs was born January 6, 1924, in the Flint Hill community of Cleveland County, North Carolina, a small community just outside of Boiling Springs, about 10 miles west of Shelby. His father, George Elam Scruggs, was a farmer and a bookkeeper who died of a protracted illness when Earl was four years old. Upon his death, Scruggs' mother, Georgia Lula Ruppe (called Lula), was left to take care of the farm and five children, of which Earl was the youngest.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: The family members all played music. The father played an open back banjo using the frailing technique, though as an adult Earl had no recollection of his father's playing. Mrs. Scruggs played the pump organ. Earl's siblings, older brothers Junie and Horace and older sisters Eula Mae and Ruby, all played banjo and guitar. Scruggs recalled a visit to his uncle's home at age six to hear a blind banjo player named Mack Woolbright, who played a finger-picking style and had recorded for Columbia Records. It made an impression on Scruggs, who said, "He'd sit in the rocking chair, and he'd pick some and it was just amazing. I couldn't imagine—he was the first, what I call a good banjo player." Scruggs then took up the instrument—he was too small to hold it at first and improvised by setting his brother Junie's banjo beside him on the floor. He moved it around depending on what part of the neck he was playing. After his father's death, Scruggs seemed to take solace in playing music, and when not in school or doing farm chores, spent nearly every spare moment he had practicing. His first radio performance was at age 11 on a talent scout show.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Scruggs is noted for popularizing a three-finger banjo-picking style now called "Scruggs style" that has become a defining characteristic of bluegrass music. Prior to Scruggs, most banjo players used the frailing or clawhammer technique, which consists of holding the fingers bent like a claw and moving the entire hand in a downward motion so that the strings are struck with the back of the middle fingernail. This motion is followed by striking the thumb on a single string. The three-finger style of playing is radically different from frailing; the hand remains stationary and only the fingers and thumb move, somewhat similar to classical guitar technique. Scruggs style also involves using picks on three digits "(see photo)", each plucking individual strings—downward with the thumb, then upward with the index and middle finger in sequence. When done skillfully and in rapid sequence, the style allows any digit (though usually the thumb) to play a melody, while the other two digits play arpeggios of the melody line. The use of picks gives each note a louder percussive attack, creating an exciting effect, described by "The New York Times" as "like thumbtacks plinking rhythmically on a tin roof". This departure from traditional playing elevated the banjo to become more of a solo instrument—a promotion from its former role of providing background rhythm or serving as a comedian's prop—and popularized the instrument in several genres of music.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Earl Scruggs did not invent three-finger banjo playing; in fact, he said the three-finger style was the most common way to play the five-string banjo in his hometown in western North Carolina. An early influence was a local banjoist, DeWitt "Snuffy" Jenkins, who plucked in a finger style. According to banjoist and historian Tony Trischka, "Jenkins came about as close as one could to Scruggs style without actually playing it". At age ten, when Scruggs first learned the technique, he recalled that he was at home in his room after a quarrel with his brother. He was idly playing a song called "Reuben" and suddenly realized that he was playing with three fingers, not two. "That excited me to no end", he later recalled, and said he ran through the house repeatedly yelling "I've got it". From there he devoted all his free time to perfecting his timing and to adding syncopation and variations to it. Controversy exists as to the actual origin of three-finger picking style. Don Reno, an eminent banjo player who also played this style and who knew Scruggs at that young age, described Scruggs' early playing as similar to that of Snuffy Jenkins. Scruggs, however, consistently referred to it as his own, saying that he adapted to it "a syncopated roll that was quite different." On the subject, John Hartford said, "Here's the way I feel about it. Everybody's all worried about who invented the style and it's obvious that three finger banjo pickers have been around a long time—maybe since 1840. But it's my feeling that if it wasn't for Earl Scruggs, you wouldn't be worried about who invented it."


title: Earl Scruggs

text: At age 15, Scruggs played in a group called The Morris Brothers for a few months, but quit to work in a factory making sewing thread in the Lily Textile Mill near his home in North Carolina. He worked there about two years, earning 40 cents an hour, until the draft restriction for World War II was lifted in 1945, at which time he returned to music, performing with "Lost John Miller and his Allied Kentuckians" on WNOX in Knoxville. About this time an opening to play with Bill Monroe became available.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Bill Monroe, 13 years older than Scruggs, was prominent in country music at the time. His career started with the "Monroe Brothers", a duo with his brother Charlie. Bill sang the high tenor harmony parts, a sound called "high lonesome", for which he became noted. The brothers split up in 1938 and Bill, a native of "the Bluegrass State" of Kentucky, formed a new group called Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. They first played on the Opry in 1939 and soon became a popular touring band featuring a vocalist named Lester Flatt. The name "bluegrass" stuck and eventually became the eponym for this entire genre of country music and Monroe became known as "the father of bluegrass".


title: Earl Scruggs

text: When Scruggs was 21, Monroe was looking for a banjo player for his group, because David "Stringbean" Akeman was quitting. At the time, banjo players often functioned in the band as comedians, and the instrument was often held as a prop—their clawhammer playing was almost inaudible. Monroe, along with band member Lester Flatt, auditioned several banjo players who had the same traditional playing style as Akeman. When Scruggs auditioned for them at the Tulane Hotel in Nashville, Flatt said," I was thrilled. It was so different! I had never heard that kind of banjo picking." Scruggs joined Monroe in late 1945, earning $50 a week. After they accepted Scruggs as one of the Blue Grass Boys, the roster consisted of Bill Monroe (vocals/mandolin), Lester Flatt (guitar/vocals), Earl Scruggs (banjo), Chubby Wise (fiddle), and Howard Watts (stage name Cedric Rainwater) on bass. This group of men became the prototype of what a bluegrass band would become.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: With Monroe and Lester Flatt, Scruggs performed on the Grand Ole Opry and in September 1946 recorded the classic hit "Blue Moon of Kentucky"; a song that was designated by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry, and later added to the Grammy Hall of Fame. The work schedule was heavy in Monroe's band. They were playing a lot of jobs in movie theaters all over the south, riding in a 1941 Chevrolet from town to town, doing up to six shows a day and not finishing up until about eleven at night. Lester Flatt said, "It wasn't anything to ride two or three days in a car. We didn't have buses like we do now, and we never had our shoes off". The self-imposed rule was to always get back in time to play the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville each Saturday night. Scruggs said of Monroe that "Bill would never let the music go down no matter how tired we were. If a man would slack off, he would move over and get that mandolin up close on him and get him back up there". Despite the group's success, Scruggs decided the demands were too great. He was single at the time, and the brief few hours on Saturdays that he made it home, it was just to pack his suitcase at the Tulane Hotel where he lived alone, then repeat the cycle—he had done this for two years. He turned in his resignation, planning to go take care of his mother in North Carolina. Flatt had also made up his mind to leave, but he had not told anyone. He later gave his two-week notice, but, before the notice was up, the bass player Howard Watts announced that he was leaving too. Despite Monroe's pleading, they left the band. Monroe thought Flatt and Scruggs had a secret understanding, but both men denied it. Monroe did not speak to either one for 20 years thereafter, a feud well known in country music circles.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In 1948 Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs formed the duo Flatt and Scruggs and chose the name "the Foggy Mountain Boys" for their backing band. The name came from a song by the Carter Family called "Foggy Mountain Top" that the band used as a theme song at the time. Flatt later acknowledged that they consciously tried to make their sound different from Monroe's group. In the mid 1950s they dropped the mandolin and added a Dobro, played by Buck "Uncle Josh" Graves. In the spring of 1949, their second Mercury recording session yielded the classic "Foggy Mountain Breakdown", released on 78 RPM phonograph records that were in use at the time. Previously, Scruggs had performed something similar, called "Bluegrass Breakdown" with Bill Monroe, but Monroe had denied him songwriting credit for it. Later, Scruggs changed the song, adding a minor chord, thus creating "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" The song contains a musical oddity—Flatt plays an E major chord against Scruggs's E minor. When asked about the dissonance years later, Scruggs said he had tried to get Flatt to consistently play a minor there to no avail; he said he eventually became used to the sound and even fond of it. The song won a Grammy and became an anthem for many banjo players to attempt to master. The band routinely tuned its instruments a half-step higher than standard tuning in those days to get more brightness or pop to the sound, returning to standard pitch in the 1960s.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: The popularity of Foggy Mountain Breakdown resurged years later when it was featured in the 1967 film "Bonnie and Clyde", which introduced the song to a younger generation of fans. Scruggs received a phone call from the show's producer and star, Warren Beatty, first asking Scruggs to write a song for the movie. Soon Beatty called back saying that he wanted to use the existing vintage Mercury recording of Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and rejected the argument that it was recorded 18 years prior at a radio station with no modern enhancements. The film was a hit, called by the "Los Angeles Times" "a landmark film that helped usher in a new era in American filmmaking." In 2005, the song was selected for the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry of works of unusual merit.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In October 1951, the band recorded "Earl's Breakdown" which featured a technique where Scruggs would manually de-tune the second and third strings of the banjo during a song using a cam device he had made to attach to the instrument, giving the surprise effect of a downward string bend. He and his brother Horace had experimented with it when they were growing up. Scruggs had drilled some holes in the peghead of his banjo to install the device and chipped the pearl inlay. He covered the holes with a piece of metal, which can be seen on the album cover of "Foggy Mountain Jamboree". The technique became popular and led to improvement of the design (without drilling holes) by Bill Keith who then manufactured Scruggs-Keith Tuners. The original tuners Scruggs made and used are now in a museum display at the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, North Carolina.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In 1953, Martha White Foods sponsored the band's regular early morning radio shows on WSM in Nashville, where the duo sang the company's catchy bluegrass jingle written by Pat Twitty. About this time, country music television shows, on which Flatt and Scruggs appeared regularly, went into syndication, vastly increasing the group's exposure. Despite the group's increasing popularity and fan mail, WSM did not allow Flatt and Scruggs to become members of the Grand Ole Opry at first. According to "Tennessean" writer Peter Cooper, Bill Monroe was in opposition and worked behind the scenes to keep Flatt and Scruggs off the Opry to the extent of having petitions made against their membership. In 1955 Martha White Foods' CEO Cohen E. Williams intervened by threatening to pull all of his advertising from WSM unless the band appeared on the Opry in the segment sponsored by his company. As years went by, the band became synonymous with Martha White to the extent that the advertising jingle became a hit, and the band rarely played a concert without it. Fans shouted requests for them to play it, even at Carnegie Hall.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: On September 24, 1962, the duo recorded "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" for the TV show "The Beverly Hillbillies". Sung by Jerry Scoggins, the theme song became an immediate country music hit and was played at the beginning and end of each episode of the series. The song went to #1 on the Billboard country chart, a first for any bluegrass recording. The song spent 20 weeks on that chart; it also reached #44 on Billboard's pop chart. The television show was also a huge hit, broadcast in 76 countries around the world. In Queens, New York a five year old boy named Béla Fleck heard the Jed Clampett theme on television. Fleck said, "I couldn't breathe or think; I was completely mesmerized." He said it awakened a deeply embedded predisposition that "was just in there" to learn how to play the banjo. Flatt and Scruggs appeared in several episodes as family friends of the fictional Clampetts. In their first appearance (season 1, episode 20), they portray themselves in the show and perform both the theme song and "Pearl, Pearl, Pearl". That song went to #8 on the country chart in 1963. Scruggs published an instruction book entitled "Earl Scruggs and the Five String Banjo" in 1968. It received a Gold Book Award by the publisher, Peer-Southern Corporation when it sold over a million copies. Over their 20-year association, Flatt and Scruggs recorded over 50 albums and 75 single records and featured over 20 different musicians as "Foggy Mountain Boys"—side men backing the duo.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: By the end of the 1960s, Scruggs was getting bored with repetition of the classic bluegrass fare. By now, his sons were professional musicians, and he was caught up in their enthusiasm for more contemporary music. He said, "I love bluegrass music, and still like to play it, but I do like to mix in some other music for my own personal satisfaction, because if I don't, I can get a little bogged down and a little depressed". Scruggs also wanted to play concerts in venues that normally featured rock and roll acts. Columbia Records executives told Flatt and Scruggs that they intended to try a new producer, Bob Johnston, instead of their long-time producer Don Law. Johnston had produced Bob Dylan's records. This new association produced "Changin' Times", "Nashville Airplane", and "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde" albums. Flatt was not happy with some of this material—he didn't like singing Bob Dylan songs and refused to perform them, saying "I can't sing Bob Dylan stuff, I mean. Columbia has got Bob Dylan, why did they want me?". Even the success of the "Bonnie and Clyde" album was not enough to prevent their breakup in 1969. After the split, Flatt formed a traditional bluegrass group with Curly Seckler and Marty Stuart called The Nashville Grass, and Scruggs formed the Earl Scruggs Revue with his sons.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Neither Flatt nor Scruggs spoke to each other for the next ten years—until 1979 when Flatt was in the hospital. Scruggs made an unannounced visit to his bedside. The two men talked for more than an hour. Even though Flatt's voice was barely above a whisper, he spoke of a reunion. Scruggs answered yes, but told Flatt they would talk when he was better. Flatt said, "It came as quite a surprise and made me feel good." However, Lester Flatt never recovered, and died May 11, 1979. Historian Barry Willis, speaking of the meeting, said "Earl gave Lester his flowers while he was still living." (He was referring to a 1957 Flatt and Scruggs recording of "Give Me My Flowers While I'm Still Living".)


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In early 1969, Scruggs formed the Earl Scruggs Revue, consisting of two of his sons, Randy (guitar) and Gary (bass) and later Vassar Clements (fiddle), Josh Graves (Dobro) and Scruggs' youngest son, Steve (drums). On November 15, 1969, Scruggs performed live with the newly formed group on an open-air stage in Washington, D.C. at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Scruggs was one of the few bluegrass or country artists to give support to the anti-war movement. The Earl Scruggs Revue gained popularity on college campuses, live shows and festivals and appeared on the bill with acts like Steppenwolf, The Byrds and James Taylor. They recorded for Columbia Records and made frequent network television appearances though the 1970s. Their album "I Saw the Light with a Little Help from my Friends" featured Linda Ronstadt, Arlo Guthrie, Tracy Nelson, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. This collaboration sparked enthusiasm by the latter to make the album "Will the Circle be Unbroken". Earl and Louise Scruggs made phone calls to eminent country stars like Roy Acuff and "Mother" Maybelle Carter to get them to participate in this project to bring a unique combination of older players with young ones. Bill Monroe refused to participate saying he had to remain true to the style he pioneered, and this "is not bluegrass" The album became a classic, and was selected for the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry of works of unusual merit.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Scruggs had to retire from the road in 1980 because of back problems, but the Earl Scruggs Revue did not part ways until 1982. Despite the group's commercial success, they were never embraced by bluegrass or country music purists. Scruggs remained active musically and released "The Storyteller and the Banjoman" with Tom T. Hall in 1982, and a compilation album "Top of the World" in 1983. In 1994, Scruggs teamed up with Randy Scruggs and Doc Watson to contribute the song "Keep on the Sunny Side" to the AIDS benefit album "Red Hot + Country". In 2001, Scruggs broke a 17-year personal album hiatus with the album "Earl Scruggs and Friends", featuring Elton John, Sting, Don Henley, Johnny Cash, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton, and Steve Martin. It includes the song "Passin' Thru", written by Johnny Cash and Randy Scruggs. He also released a live album "The Three Pickers" with Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs, recorded in Winston-Salem in December, 2002.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In the late 1950s Scruggs met with Bill Nelson, one of the owners of the Vega Musical Instrument Company in Boston, to sign a contract to design and endorse a new banjo to be called "The Earl Scruggs Model". The company had made banjos since before 1912 and already had a Pete Seeger model. There would be four Scruggs models in the top-of-the-line banjos they produced. It was the first time a prominent bluegrass banjo player had played any brand other than a Gibson. Scruggs participated in Vega's marketing campaign that claimed that the banjo was constructed to Scruggs's design specifications, which was true, but the finished product fell short of his expectations. According to Scruggs's friend and fellow banjoist, Curtis McPeake, Scruggs never cared for it. McPeake stated, "They were good banjos, they just wasn't ["sic"] what Earl wanted to play." Scruggs continued to perform and record using his Gibson Granada. The Vega company was sold to the C.F. Martin company in 1970, and the contract was dissolved.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In 1984, Gibson produced what Scruggs had wanted—the Gibson "Earl Scruggs Standard", a replica of his personal 1934 Gibson Granada RB Mastertone banjo, number 9584-3. This banjo had been changed over its long existence and the only remaining original parts were the rim, the tone ring and the resonator (the wooden back of the instrument). The banjo was originally gold-plated, but the gold had long-since worn off and had been replaced with nickel hardware. Gibson elected to make the replica model nickel-plated as well, to look like Scruggs' own. Scruggs' actual 1934 model was previously owned by a series of influential players beginning with Snuffy Jenkins, who bought it for $37.50 at a pawn shop in South Carolina. Jenkins sold it to Don Reno, who sold it to Scruggs. When Scruggs acquired it, the instrument was in poor condition and he sent it to the Gibson Company for refurbishing, including a new fingerboard, pearl inlays, and a more slender neck. During this time Scruggs used his Gibson RB-3 for some of the Mercury recording sessions. Banjo enthusiasts have located the shipping records from Gibson to determine the exact dates the Granada Mastertone was missing on certain recordings.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: On December 14, 1946, 19-year-old Anne Louise Certain attended the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. She went backstage after the performance to meet some of the performers, including Scruggs, who had been with Bill Monroe's band about a year at that time. Scruggs and Certain began dating and fell in love. They were married about a year and a half later in April 1948. When Flatt and Scruggs formed the new group, Scruggs had done most of the bookings for the band, but being on the road for hours in a car and stopping at a phone booth to communicate with venues, often at odd hours, was difficult. Louise had a business aptitude and began helping by doing the phone work. She eventually became the booking agent and ultimately the group's manager, Nashville's first woman to become prominent in that role. Her acumen and skills in the job were prescient. She turned the band into TV personalities and helped propel them into what today would be called rock stars, touring with Joan Baez and performing at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival. She recruited noted artist Thomas B. Allen, who had done covers for "The New Yorker" and "Sports Illustrated" to create cover illustrations for 17 of the group's albums. She helped market the group to younger audiences at college campuses and arranged a live album to be recorded at Carnegie Hall. Earl Scruggs said, "What talent I had never would have peaked without her. She helped shape music up as a business, instead of just people out picking and grinning." Louise died from complications of respiratory disease on February 2, 2006 at age 78, predeceasing her husband by six years. In 2007, The Country Music Hall of Fame created The Louise Scruggs Memorial Forum, an annual event to honor a music industry business leader.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: In 1955, Scruggs received word that his mother, Lula, had suffered a stroke and heart attack in North Carolina. The only flight available from Nashville involved such a series of connecting cities that it was not feasible to fly. Scruggs and his wife, with sons Gary and Randy, decided to drive all night from Nashville to see her when they were involved in an automobile accident just east of Knoxville about 3 a.m. October 2. Their car was hit by a drunk driver, a Fort Campbell soldier who had pulled out from a side road into their path, then fled the scene after the collision. The children were not hurt, but Earl suffered a fractured pelvis and dislocations of both hips, which would plague him for years, and Louise had been thrown into the windshield, receiving multiple lacerations. They were flown to a Nashville hospital where Scruggs remained hospitalized for about two months. He received thousands of letters from well-wishers. He returned to music in January 1956, about four months after the injury, but after working a week or so, one of the hips collapsed, and he returned to the hospital for a metal hip to be implanted. Seven years later, the other hip required similar surgery. The first metal hip lasted for some 40 years, but eventually failed, requiring a total hip replacement in October 1996, when he was age 72. While still in the recovery room after this hip operation, Scruggs suffered a heart attack; he was returned to the operating room later the same day for quintuple coronary bypass surgery. Despite the dire circumstances, he recovered and returned to his musical career.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Scruggs was involved in a solo plane crash in October 1975. He was flying his 1974 Cessna Skyhawk II aircraft home to Nashville around midnight from a performance of the Earl Scruggs Revue in Murray, Kentucky. On his landing approach he was enveloped in dense fog and overshot the runway at Cornelia Fort Airpark in Nashville and the plane flipped over. The automatic crash alert system in the plane did not function, and Scruggs remained without help for five hours. He crawled about 150 feet from the wreckage with a broken ankle, broken nose, and facial lacerations, afraid that the plane might catch fire. His family was driving home from the same concert and was unaware of the crash, but his niece became worried when he did not arrive. She called police at about 4 a.m., and they went to the airport, where they heard Scruggs' cries for help from a field near the runway. He recovered, but was in a wheelchair for a few weeks, including for the premiere of the Scruggs documentary "Banjoman" at the Kennedy Center.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Steve Scruggs, Earl's youngest son, was the drummer for the Earl Scruggs Revue at one point. He died in September 1992 of a self-inflicted gun shot after killing his wife, according to prosecutor Dent Moriss. Middle son Randy Scruggs, guitarist and music producer, died after a short illness on April 17, 2018 at the age of 64.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: Every January for many years, Scruggs' birthday was celebrated by a party at his home on Franklin Road in Nashville. After a buffet dinner, guests would gather in the living room for an informal "pickin' party" where some of country music's best known stars would sing and play with no one around but family and close friends. The attendees over the years included Tom T. Hall, Béla Fleck, Travis Tritt, Vince Gill, Tim O'Brien, Emmylou Harris, Mac Wiseman, Marty Stuart, Porter Wagoner, Bill Anderson, Jerry Douglas, Josh Graves and many others. At Scruggs' 80th birthday party in 2004, country singer Porter Wagoner said, "Earl is to the five-string banjo what Babe Ruth was to baseball. He is the best there ever was and the best there ever will be."


title: Earl Scruggs

text: At age 88, Earl Scruggs died from natural causes on the morning of March 28, 2012, in a Nashville hospital. His funeral was held on Sunday, April 1, 2012, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, and was open to the public. He was buried at Spring Hill Cemetery in a private service.


title: Earl Scruggs

text: The Earl Scruggs Center opened January 11, 2014—a $5.5 million, 100,000 square foot facility located in the court square of Shelby, North Carolina, at the renovated county courthouse. It showcases the musical contributions of Scruggs, the most eminent ambassador of the music of that region, and features a museum and a life-sized statue of Scruggs at a young age. The center received a $1.5 million economic development grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce and also funds from corporate donors. It serves as an educational center providing classes and field trips for students. The opening was celebrated by a sold-out concert by Vince Gill, Travis Tritt, Sam Bush, and others.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development and cultural influence of arcade video games, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The period began with the release of "Space Invaders" in 1978, which led to a wave of shoot 'em up games such as "Galaxian" and the vector graphics-based "Asteroids" in 1979, made possible by new computing technology that had greater power and lower costs. Arcade video games transitioned from black-and-white to color, with titles such as "Frogger" and "Centipede" taking advantage of the visual opportunities of bright palettes.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Video game arcades became a part of popular culture and a primary channel for new games. Video game genres were still being established, but included space-themed shooter games such as "Defender" and "Galaga", maze chase games which followed the design established by "Pac-Man", driving and racing games which more frequently used 3D perspectives such as "Turbo" and "Pole Position", character action games such as "Pac-Man" and "Frogger", and the beginning of what would later be called platform games touched off by "Donkey Kong". Games began starring named player characters, such as Pac-Man, Mario and "Q*bert", and some of these characters crossed over into other media including songs, cartoons, and movies. The 1982 film "Tron" was closely tied to an arcade game of the same name.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Although the exact years differ, most sources agree the period was from about the late 1970s to early 1980s. Technology journalist Jason Whittaker, in "The Cyberspace Handbook", places the beginning of the golden age in 1978, with the release of "Space Invaders". Video game journalist Steven L. Kent, in his book "The Ultimate History of Video Games", places it at 1979 to 1983. The book pointed out that 1979 was the year that "Space Invaders" (which he credits for ushering in the golden age) was gaining considerable popularity in the United States, and the year that saw vector display technology, first seen in arcades in 1977 with "Space Wars", rise to prominence via Atari's "Asteroids". However, 1983 was the period that began "a fairly steady decline" in the coin-operated video game business and when many arcades started disappearing.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Walter Day of Twin Galaxies places this period's beginning in the late 1970s, when color arcade games became more prevalent and arcade video games started appearing outside of their traditional bowling alley and bar locales, through to its ending in the mid-1980s. "RePlay" magazine in 1985 dated the arcade industry's "video boom" years from 1979 to 1982. The golden age of arcade games largely coincided with, and partly fueled, the second generation of game consoles and the microcomputer revolution.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: In contrast to most other sources, the "History of Computing Project" website places the golden age of video games between 1971 and 1983, covering the "mainstream appearance of video games as a consumer market" and "the rise of dedicated hardware systems and the origin of multi-game cartridge based systems". 1971 was chosen as an earlier start date by the project for two reasons: the creator of "Pong" filed a pivotal patent regarding video game technology, and it was the release of the first arcade video game machine, "Computer Space".


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The golden age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games. The era saw the rapid spread of video arcades across North America, Europe, and Asia. The number of video game arcades in North America was doubled between 1980 and 1982; reaching a peak of 10,000 video game arcades across the region (compared to 4,000 as of 1998). Beginning with "Space Invaders", video arcade games also started to appear in supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations and many other retail establishments looking for extra income. Video game arcades at the time became as common as convenience stores, while arcade games like "Pac-Man" and "Space Invaders" appeared in most locations across the United States, including even funeral homes. The sales of arcade video game machines increased significantly during this period, from $50 million in 1978 to $900 million in 1981, with 500,000 arcade machines sold in the United States at prices ranging as high as $3000 in 1982 alone. By 1982, there were 24,000 full arcades, 400,000 arcade street locations and 1.5 million arcade machines active in North America. The market was very competitive; the average life span of an arcade game was four to six months. Some games like "Robby Roto" failed because they were too complex to learn quickly, and others like "Star Fire" because they were too unfamiliar to the audience. "Qix" was briefly very popular but, Taito's Keith Egging later said, "too mystifying for gamers ... impossible to master and when the novelty wore off, the game faded". At around this time, the home video game industry (second-generation video game consoles and early home computer games) emerged as "an outgrowth of the widespread success of video arcades" at the time.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: In 1980, the U.S. arcade video game industry's revenue generated from quarters tripled to $2.8 billion. By 1981, the arcade video game industry in the United States was generating an annual revenue of over $5 billion with some estimates as high as $10.5 billion for all video games (arcade and home) in the U.S. that year, which was three times the amount spent on movie tickets in 1981. The total revenue for the U.S. arcade video game industry in 1981 was estimated at more than $7 billion though some analysts estimated the real amount may have been much higher. By 1982, video games accounted for 87% of the $8.9 billion in commercial games sales in the United States. In 1982, the arcade video game industry's revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music ($4 billion) and Hollywood films ($3 billion) combined that year. It also exceeded the revenues of all major sports combined at the time, earning three times the combined ticket and television revenues of Major League Baseball, basketball, and American football, as well as earning twice as much as all the casinos in Nevada combined. This was also more than twice as much revenue as the $3.8 billion generated by the home video game industry (during the second generation of consoles) that same year; both the arcade and home markets combined added up to a total revenue between $11.8 billion and $12.8 billion for the U.S. video game industry in 1982. In comparison, the U.S. video game industry in 2011 generated total revenues between $16.3 billion and $16.6 billion.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Prior to the golden age, pinball machines were more popular than video games. The pinball industry reached a peak of 200,000 machine sales and $2.3 billion revenue in 1979, which had declined to 33,000 machines and $464 million in 1982. In comparison, the best-selling arcade games of the golden age, "Space Invaders" and "Pac-Man", had each sold over 360,000 and 400,000 cabinets, respectively, with each machine costing between $2000 and $3000 (specifically $2400 in "Pac-Man's" case). In addition, "Space Invaders" had grossed $2 billion in quarters by 1982, while "Pac-Man" had grossed over $1 billion by 1981 and $2.5 billion by the late 1990s. In 1982, "Space Invaders" was considered the highest-grossing entertainment product of its time, with comparisons made to the then highest-grossing film "Star Wars", which had grossed $486 million, while "Pac-Man" is today considered the highest-grossing arcade game of all time. Many other arcade games during the golden age also had hardware unit sales at least in the tens of thousands, including "Ms. Pac-Man" with over 115,000 units, "Asteroids" with 70,000, "Donkey Kong" with over 60,000, "Defender" with 55,000, "Galaxian" with 40,000, "Donkey Kong Junior" with 35,000, "Mr. Do!" with 30,000,


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: and "Tempest" with 29,000 units. A number of arcade games also generated revenues (from quarters) in the hundreds of millions, including "Defender" with more than $100 million in addition to many more with revenues in the tens of millions, including "Dragon's Lair" with $48 million and "Space Ace" with $13 million.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The most successful arcade game companies of this era included Taito (which ushered in the golden age with the shooter game "Space Invaders" and produced other successful arcade action games such as "Gun Fight" and "Jungle King"), Namco (the Japanese company that created "Galaxian", "Pac-Man", "Pole Position" and "Dig Dug") and Atari (the company that introduced video games into arcades with "Computer Space" and "Pong", and later produced "Asteroids"). Other companies such as Sega (who later entered the home console market against its former arch rival, Nintendo), Nintendo (whose mascot, Mario, was introduced in 1981's "Donkey Kong" as "Jumpman"), Bally Midway Manufacturing Company (which was later purchased by Williams), Cinematronics, Konami, Centuri, Williams and SNK also gained popularity around this era.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: During this period, Japanese video game manufacturers became increasingly influential in North America. By 1980, they had become very influential through licensing their games to American manufacturers. Jonathan Greenberg of "Forbes" predicted in early 1981 that Japanese companies would eventually dominate the North American video game industry, as American video game companies were increasingly licensing products from Japanese companies, who in turn were opening up North American branches. By 1982-1983, Japanese manufacturers had more directly captured a large share of the North American arcade market, which Gene Lipkin of Data East USA partly attributed to Japanese companies having more finances to invest in new ideas.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Arcades catering to video games began to gain momentum in the late 1970s, with "Space Invaders" (1978) followed by games such as "Asteroids" (1979) and "Galaxian" (1979). Arcades became more widespread in 1980 with "Pac-Man", "Missile Command" and "Berzerk", and in 1981 with "Defender", "Donkey Kong", "Frogger" and others. The central processing unit (CPU) microprocessors in these games allowed for more complexity than earlier transistor-transistor logic (TTL) discrete circuitry games such as Atari's "Pong" (1972). The arcade boom that began in the late 1970s is credited with establishing the basic techniques of interactive entertainment and for driving down hardware prices to the extent of allowing the personal computer (PC) to become a technological and economic reality.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: While color monitors had been used by several racing video games before (such as "Indy 800" and "Speed Race Twin"), it was during this period that RGB color graphics became widespread, following the release of "Galaxian" in 1979. "Galaxian" introduced a tile-based video game graphics system, which reduced processing and memory requirements by up to 64 times compared to the previous framebuffer system used by "Space Invaders". This allowed "Galaxian" to render multi-color sprites, which were animated atop a scrolling starfield backdrop, providing the basis for the hardware developed by Nintendo for arcade games such as "Radar Scope" (1980) and "Donkey Kong" followed by the Nintendo Entertainment System console.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The Golden Age also saw developers experimenting with vector displays, which produced crisp lines that couldn't be duplicated by raster displays. A few of these vector games became great hits, such as 1979's "Asteroids", 1980's "Battlezone" and "Tempest" and 1983's "Star Wars" from Atari. However, vector technology fell out of favor with arcade game companies due to the high cost of repairing vector displays.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Several developers at the time were also experimenting with pseudo-3D and stereoscopic 3D using 2D sprites on raster displays. In 1979, Nintendo's "Radar Scope" introduced a three-dimensional third-person perspective to the shoot 'em up genre, later imitated by shooters such as Konami's "Juno First" and Activision's "Beamrider" in 1983. In 1981, Sega's "Turbo" was the first racing game to feature a third-person rear view format, and use sprite scaling with full-colour graphics. Namco's "Pole Position" featured an improved rear-view racer format in 1982 that remained the standard for the genre; the game provided a perspective view of the track, with its vanishing point swaying side to side as the player approaches corners, accurately simulating forward movement into the distance. That same year, Sega released "Zaxxon", which introduced the use of isometric graphics and shadows; and "SubRoc-3D", which introduced the use of stereoscopic 3D through a special eyepiece;


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: This period also saw significant advances in digital audio technology. "Space Invaders" in 1978 was the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple chromatic descending bass notes repeating in a loop, though it was dynamic and changed tempo during stages. "Rally-X" in 1980 was the first game to feature continuous background music, which was generated using a dedicated sound chip, a Namco 3-channel PSG. That same year saw the introduction of speech synthesis, which was first used in "Stratovox", released by Sun Electronics in 1980, followed soon after by Namco's "King & Balloon".


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Developers also experimented with laserdisc players for delivering full motion video based games with movie-quality animation. The first laserdisc video game to exploit this technology was 1983's "Astron Belt" from Sega, soon followed by "Dragon's Lair" from Cinematronics; the latter was a sensation when it was released (and, in fact, the laserdisc players in many machines broke due to overuse). While laserdisc games were usually either shooter games with full-motion video backdrops like "Astron Belt" or interactive movies like "Dragon's Lair", Data East's 1983 game "Bega's Battle" introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages, which years later became the standard approach to video game storytelling. By the mid-1980s, the genre dwindled in popularity, as laserdiscs were losing out to the VHS format and the laserdisc games themselves were losing their novelty.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: 16-bit processors began appearing in several arcade games during this era. Universal's "Get A Way" (1978) was a sit-down racing game that used a 16-bit CPU, for which it was advertised as the first game to use a 16-bit microcomputer. Another racing game, Namco's "Pole Position" (1982), used the 16-bit Zilog Z8000 processor. Atari's "Food Fight" (1983) was one of the earliest games to use the Motorola 68000 processor.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: 3D computer graphics began appearing in several arcade games towards the end of the golden age. Funai's "Interstellar", a laserdisc game introduced at Tokyo's Amusement Machine Show (AM Show) in September 1983, demonstrated pre-rendered 3D computer graphics. Simutrek's "Cube Quest", another laserdisc game introduced at the same Tokyo AM Show in September 1983, combined laserdisc animation with 3D real-time computer graphics. "Star Rider", introduced by Williams Electronics at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) in October 1983, also demonstrated pre-rendered 3D graphics. Atari's "I, Robot", developed and released in 1984, was the first arcade game to be rendered entirely with real-time 3D computer graphics.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: "Space Invaders" (1978) established the "multiple life, progressively difficult level paradigm" used by many classic arcade games. Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado at Taito, he drew inspiration from Atari's block-breaker game "Breakout" (1976) and several science fiction works. Nishikado added several interactive elements to "Space Invaders" that he found lacking in earlier video games, such as the ability for enemies to react to the player's movement and fire back, with a game over triggered by enemies killing the player (either by getting hit or enemies reaching the bottom of the screen) rather than a timer running out. In contrast to earlier arcade games which often had a timer, "Space Invaders" introduced the "concept of going round after round." It also gave the player multiple lives before the game ends, and saved the high score. It also had a basic story with animated characters along with a "crescendo of action and climax" which laid the groundwork for later video games, according to Eugene Jarvis.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: With the enormous success of "Space Invaders", dozens of developers jumped into the development and manufacturing of arcade video games. Some simply copied the "invading alien hordes" idea of "Space Invaders" and turned out successful imitators like Namco's "Galaxian" and "Galaga", which extended the fixed shooter genre with new gameplay mechanics, more complex enemy patterns, and richer graphics. "Galaxian" introduced a "risk-reward" concept, while "Galaga" was one of the first games with a bonus stage. Sega's 1980 release "Space Tactics" was an early first-person space combat game with multi-directional scrolling as the player moved the cross-hairs on the screen.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Others tried new concepts and defined new genres. Rapidly evolving hardware allowed new kinds of games which allowed for different styles of gameplay. The term "action games" began being used in the early 1980s, in reference to a new genre of character action games that emerged from Japanese arcade developers, drawing inspiration from manga and anime culture. According to Eugene Jarvis, these new character-driven Japanese action games emphasized "character development, hand-drawn animation and backgrounds, and a more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" of play. Terms such as "action games" or "character games" began being used to distinguish these new character-driven action games from the space shooters that had previously dominated the video game industry. The emphasis on character-driven gameplay in turn enabled a wider variety of subgenres. In 1980, Namco released "Pac-Man", which popularized the maze chase genre, and "Rally-X", which featured a radar tracking the player position on the map. Games such as the pioneering 1981 games "Donkey Kong" and "Qix" in 1981 introduced new types of games where skill and timing are more important than shooting as fast as possible, with Nintendo's "Donkey Kong" in particular setting the template for the platform game genre.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The two most popular genres during the golden age were space shooters and character action games. While Japanese developers were creating a character-driven action game genre in the early 1980s, American developers largely adopted a different approach to game design at the time. According to Eugene Jarvis, American arcade developers focused mainly on space shooters during the late 1970s to early 1980s, greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but taking the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own "Defender" (1981) and "" (1982) as well as Atari's "Asteroids" (1979).


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Namco's "Bosconian" in 1981 introduced a free-roaming style of gameplay where the player's ship freely moves across open space, while also including a radar tracking player & enemy positions. "Bega's Battle" in 1983 introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Other examples of innovative games are Atari Games' "Paperboy" in 1984 where the goal is to successfully deliver newspapers to customers, and Namco's "Phozon" where the object is to duplicate a shape shown in the middle of the screen. The theme of Exidy's "Venture" is dungeon exploration and treasure-gathering. "Q*bert" plays upon the user's sense of depth perception to deliver a novel experience.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Some games of this era were so popular that they entered popular culture. The first to do so was "Space Invaders". The game was so popular upon its release in 1978 that an urban legend blamed it for a national shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan, leading to a production increase of coins to meet demand for the game (although 100 yen coin production was lower in 1978 and 1979 than in previous or subsequent years, and the claim does not withstand logical scrutiny: arcade operators would have emptied out their machines and taken the money to the bank, thus keeping the coins in circulation). It soon had a similar impact in North America, where it has appeared or is referenced in numerous facets of popular culture. Soon after the release of "Space Invaders", hundreds of favourable articles and stories about the emerging video game medium aired on television and were printed in newspapers and magazines. The Space Invaders Tournament held by Atari in 1980 was the first video game competition and attracted more than 10,000 participants, establishing video gaming as a mainstream hobby. By 1980, 86% of the 13–20 population in the United States had played arcade video games, and by 1981, there were more than 35 million gamers visiting video game arcades in the United States.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The game that most affected popular culture in North America was "Pac-Man". It was released in 1980 caused such a sensation that it initiated what is now referred to as "Pac-Mania" (which later became the title of the last coin-operated game in the series, released in 1987). Released by Namco, the game featured a yellow, circle-shaped creature trying to eat dots through a maze while avoiding pursuing enemies. Though no one could agree what the "hero" or enemies represented (they were variously referred to as ghosts, goblins or monsters), the game was extremely popular. The game spawned an animated television series, numerous clones, "Pac-Man"-branded foods, toys, and a hit pop song, "Pac-Man Fever". The game's popularity was such that President Ronald Reagan congratulated a player for setting a record score in "Pac-Man". "Pac-Man" was also responsible for expanding the arcade game market to involve large numbers of female audiences across all age groups. Though many popular games quickly entered the lexicon of popular culture, most have since left, and "Pac-Man" is unusual in remaining a recognized term in popular culture, along with "Space Invaders", "Donkey Kong", "Mario" and "Q*bert".


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Seen as an additional source of revenue, arcade games began popping up outside of dedicated arcades, including bars, restaurants, movie theaters, bowling alleys, convenience stores, laundromats, gas stations, supermarkets, airports, even dentist and doctor offices. Showbiz Pizza and Chuck E. Cheese were founded specifically as restaurants focused on featuring the latest arcade titles.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: In 1982, the game show "Starcade" premiered. The program focused on players competing to achieve high scores on the latest arcade titles, with the chance to win the grand prize of their own arcade machine if they could hit a target score within a specific time frame. The show ran until 1984 on TBS and syndication.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: In 1983, an animated television series produced for Saturday mornings called Saturday Supercade featured video game characters from the era, such as Frogger, Donkey Kong, Q*bert, Donkey Kong Jr., Kangaroo, Space Ace, and Pitfall Harry.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Arcade games at the time affected the music industry, revenues for which had declined by $400 million between 1978 and 1981 (from $4.1 billion to $3.7 billion), a decrease that was directly credited to the rise of arcade games at the time. Successful songs based on video games also began appearing. The pioneering electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) sampled "Space Invaders" sounds in their 1978 self-titled album and the hit single "Computer Game" from the same album, the latter selling over 400,000 copies in the United States. In turn, YMO had a major influence on much of the video game music produced during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Other pop songs based on "Space Invaders" soon followed, including "Disco Space Invaders" (1979) by Funny Stuff, "Space Invaders" (1980) by Player One (known as Playback in the US), and the hit songs "Space Invader" (1980) by The Pretenders and "Space Invaders" (1980) by Uncle Vic. The game was also the basis for Player One's "Space Invaders" (1979), which in turn provided the bassline for Jesse Saunders' "On and On" (1984), the first Chicago house music track. The song "Pac-Man Fever" reached No. 9 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and sold over a million singles in 1982, while the album "Pac-Man Fever" sold over a million records, with both receiving Gold certifications. That same year, R. Cade and the Video Victims also produced an arcade-inspired album, "Get Victimized", featuring songs such as "Donkey Kong". In 1984, former YMO member Haruomi Hosono produced an album entirely from Namco arcade game samples entitled "Video Game Music", an early example of a chiptune record and the first video game music album. Arcade game sounds also had a strong influence on the hip hop, pop music (particularly synthpop) and electro music genres during the early 1980s. The booming success of video games at the time led to music magazine "Billboard" listing the 15 top-selling video games alongside their record charts by 1982. More than a decade later, the first electroclash record, I-F's "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass" (1997), has been described as "burbling electro in a vocodered homage to Atari-era hi-jinks", particularly "Space Invaders" which it was named after.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Arcade games also influenced the film industry; beginning with "Space Invaders", arcade games began appearing at many movie theaters, while early films based on video games were also produced, most notably "Tron", which grossed over $33 million in 1982 which began the "Tron" franchise which included a video game adaptation that grossed more than the film. Other films based on video games included the 1983 films "WarGames" (where Matthew Broderick plays "Galaga" at an arcade), "Nightmares", and "Joysticks", the 1984 films "The Last Starfighter", as well as "Cloak & Dagger" (in which an Atari 5200 cartridge implausibly containing the eponymous arcade game becomes the film's "MacGuffin"). Arcades also appeared in many other films at the time, such as "Dawn of the Dead" (where they play "Gun Fight" and "F-1") in 1978, and "Midnight Madness" in 1980, "Take This Job and Shove It" and "Puberty Blues" in 1981, the 1982 releases "Rocky III", "Fast Times At Ridgemont High", "Koyaanisqatsi" and "The Toy", the 1983 releases "Psycho II", "Spring Break","Terms of Endearment" and "Never Say Never Again", the 1984 releases "Footloose", "The Karate Kid" (where Elisabeth Shue plays "Pac-Man"), "The Terminator", "Night of the Comet" and "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension", the 1985 releases "The Goonies", "The Heavenly Kid", "The Boys Next Door" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" as well as the 1986 films "Something Wild", "The Color of Money" and "Psycho III" (where Norman Bates stands next to a "Berzerk" cabinet). "Over the Top" and "Can't Buy Me Love" showcase several arcade game cabinets as well. Coin-operated games (both video and mechanical) are central to the plots of the 1988 films "Big" and "Kung-Fu Master".


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: In more recent years, there have been critically acclaimed documentaries based on the golden age of arcade games, such as "" (2007) and "" (2007). Since 2010, many arcade-related features or films incorporating 1980's nostalgia have been released including "" (2010), "Wreck-It Ralph" (2012), "Ping Pong Summer" (2014), "Pixels" (2015), "Everybody Wants Some!!" (2016),"Summer of 84" (2018) and "Ready Player One" (2018) which is based upon the novel by Ernest Cline and directed by Steven Spielberg. Television shows and streaming series have exhibited arcade games including "The Goldbergs" and the Netflix series "Stranger Things" (both of which feature "Dragon's Lair" among other games).


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The period saw the emergence of a gaming media, publications dedicated to video games, in the form of video game journalism and strategy guides. The enormous popularity of video arcade games led to the very first video game strategy guides; these guides (rare to find today) discussed in detail the patterns and strategies of each game, including variations, to a degree that few guides seen since can match. "Turning the machine over"—making the score counter overflow and reset to zero—was often the final challenge of a game for those who mastered it, and the last obstacle to getting the highest score.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Some of these strategy guides sold hundreds of thousands of copies at prices ranging from $1.95 to $3.95 in 1982 (equivalent to between $ and $ in 2022). That year, Ken Uston's "Mastering Pac-Man" sold 750,000 copies, reaching No. 5 on B. Dalton's mass-market bestseller list, while Bantam's "How to Master the Video Games" sold 600,000 copies, appearing on "The New York Times" mass-market paperback list. By 1983, 1.7 million copies of "Mastering Pac-Man" had been printed.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: For arcade games, success was usually judged by either the number of arcade hardware units sold to operators, or the amount of revenue generated, from the number of coins (such as quarters or 100 yen coins) inserted into machines, and/or the hardware sales (with arcade hardware prices often ranging from $1000 to $4000). This list only includes arcade games that have sold more than 10,000 hardware units.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The golden age cooled around the mid-1980s as copies of popular games began to saturate the arcades. Arcade video game revenues in the United States had declined from $8 billion in 1981 to $5 billion in 1983, reaching a low of $4 billion in 1984. The arcade market had recovered by 1986, with the help of software conversion kits, the arrival of popular beat 'em up games (such as "Kung-Fu Master" and "Renegade"), and advanced motion simulator games (such as Sega's "taikan" games including "Hang-On", "Space Harrier", "Out Run" and "After Burner").


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Arcades remained commonplace through to the 1990s as there were still new genres being explored. In 1987, arcades experienced a short resurgence with "Double Dragon", which started the golden age of beat 'em up games, a genre that peaked in popularity with "Final Fight" two years later. In 1988, arcade game revenues in the United States rose back to $6.4 billion, largely due to the rising popularity of violent action games in the beat 'em up and run and gun shooter genres. However, the growth of home video game systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System led to another brief arcade decline toward the end of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, the Genesis (Mega Drive outside most of North America) and Super NES (Super Famicom in Japan) greatly improved home play and some of their technology was even integrated into a few video arcade machines.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: In the early 1990s, the release of Capcom's "Street Fighter II" established the modern style of fighting games and led to a number of similar games, resulting in a renaissance for the arcades. Another factor was realism, including the "3D Revolution" from 2D and pseudo-3D graphics to true real-time 3D polygon graphics. This was largely driven by a technological arms race between Sega and Namco.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: By the early 2000s, the sales of arcade machines in North America had declined, with 4,000 unit sales being considered a hit by the time. One of the causes of decline was new generations of video game consoles and personal computers that sapped interest from arcades.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Since the 2000s, arcade games have taken different routes globally. In the United States, arcades have become niche markets as they compete with the home console market, and they adapted other business models, such as providing other entertainment options or adding prize redemptions. In Japan, some arcades continue to survive in the early 21st century, with games like "Dance Dance Revolution" and "The House of the Dead" tailored to experiences that players cannot easily have at home.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: The Golden Age of Video Arcade Games spawned numerous cultural icons and even gave some companies their identity. Elements from games such as "Space Invaders", "Pac-Man", "Donkey Kong", "Frogger", and "Centipede" are still recognized in today's popular culture, and new entries in the franchises for some golden age games continued to be released decades later.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: "Pac-Man" and "Dragon's Lair" joined "Pong" for permanent display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. for their cultural impact in the United States. No other video game has been inducted since.


title: Golden age of arcade video games

text: Emulators such as the Internet Archive Virtual Arcade are able to run these classic games inside a web browser window on a modern computer. Computers have gotten faster per Moore's Law. JavaScript emulators can now run copies of the original console ROMs without porting the code to the new systems.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: A Diet Coke and Mentos eruption (also known as a soda geyser) is a reaction between the carbonated beverage Diet Coke and Mentos mints that causes the beverage to be expelled from its container. The candies catalyze the release of gas from the beverage (this will work on any drink that is carbonated), which creates an eruption that pushes most of the liquid up and out of the bottle. Lee Marek and "Marek's Kid Scientists" were the first to publicly demonstrate the experiment on the "Late Show with David Letterman" in 1999. Steve Spangler's televised demonstration of the eruption in 2005 became popular on YouTube, launching a chain of several other Diet Coke and Mentos experiment viral videos. Experiments carried out at altitudes ranging from below sea level in Death Valley to the summit of Pikes Peak have demonstrated that the reaction works better at higher elevations.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: In the 1910s, Wint-O-Green Life Savers were used to create soda geysers. The tubes of candies were threaded onto a pipe cleaner and dropped into the soft drink to create a geyser. At the end of the 1990s, the manufacturer of Wintergreen Lifesavers increased the size of the mints and they no longer fit in the mouth of soda bottles. Science teachers found that Mentos candies had the same effect when dropped into a bottle of any carbonated soft drink.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: Lee Marek and "Marek's Kid Scientists" performed the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment on the "Late Show with David Letterman" in 1999. In March 2002, Steve Spangler, a science educator, did the demonstration on KUSA-TV, an NBC affiliate, in Denver, Colorado. The Diet Coke and Mentos geyser experiment became an internet sensation in September 2005. The experiment became a subject of the television show "MythBusters" in 2006. Spangler signed a licensing agreement with Perfetti Van Melle, the maker of Mentos, after inventing an apparatus aimed to make it easier to drop the Mentos into the bottle and produce a large soda geyser. Amazing Toys, Spangler's toy company, released the Geyser Tube toys in February 2007. In October 2010, a Guinness World Record of 2,865 simultaneous geysers was set at an event organized by Perfetti Van Melle at the SM Mall of Asia Complex, in Manila, Philippines. This record was afterward beaten in November 2014 by another event organized by Perfetti Van Melle and Chupa Chups in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, where 4,334 Mentos and soda fountains were set off simultaneously.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: The eruption is caused by a physical reaction, rather than any chemical reaction. The addition of the Mentos leads to the rapid nucleation of carbon dioxide gas bubbles precipitating out of the solution:


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: The conversion of dissolved carbon dioxide to gaseous carbon dioxide forms rapidly expanding gas bubbles in the soda, which pushes the beverage contents out of the container. Experimental measurements suggest that as many as 14 million bubbles are produced per liter of soda in this experiment.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: Gases, in general, are more soluble in liquids at elevated pressures. Carbonated sodas contain elevated levels of carbon dioxide under pressure. The solution becomes supersaturated with carbon dioxide when the bottle is opened, and the pressure is released. Under these conditions, carbon dioxide begins to precipitate from the solution, forming gas bubbles.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: The activation energy for bubble nucleation (formation of bubbles) depends on where the bubble forms. It is very high for bubbles that form in the liquid itself (homogeneous nucleation), and much lower if bubble growth occurs within tiny bubbles trapped in some other surface (heterogeneous nucleation). Bubble nucleation and growth in carbonated beverages almost always occur by heterogeneous nucleation: diffusion of carbon dioxide into pre-existing bubbles within the beverage. When dissolved gas diffuses into bubbles that already exist in a liquid, it is called Type IV bubble nucleation. When the pressure is released from a soda bottle upon opening it, dissolved carbon dioxide can escape into any tiny bubble located within the beverage. These ready-made bubbles (which are nucleation sites) exist in things such as tiny fibers or non-wettable crevices on the sides of the bottle. Because there usually are very few such pre-existing bubbles, the degassing process is slow. Mentos candies contain millions of cavities, roughly 1-3 μm in size, that remain unwetted when added to a soda. Because of this, the addition of Mentos candies to a carbonated beverage provides enormous numbers of pre-existing bubbles into which dissolved carbon dioxide can escape. Thus, adding Mentos candies to a carbonated beverage introduces millions of nucleation sites into the drink, which allows for degassing that is rapid enough to support a jet of foam out of a bottle. While a Mentos candy contains millions of cavities, it is likely that only about 100,000 cavities actively nucleate bubbles on any single Mentos candy placed in a carbonated beverage.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: Pre-existing bubbles provide a way for the reaction to occur without requiring bubbles to form within the liquid itself (homogeneous nucleation). Because Type IV nucleation sites (such as found on Mentos) allow the reaction to proceed with substantially lower activation energy, Mentos candies can appropriately be considered a catalyst of the process. As another example, dropping grains of salt or sand into the solution provides Type IV nucleation sites, lowers the activation energy compared to that of homogeneous nucleation, and increases the rate of carbon dioxide precipitation.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: The physical reaction that drives the eruption also causes a chemical reaction that slightly increases the pH of the soda. This is because when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water, carbonic acid is formed:


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: Loss of carbon dioxide shifts the above equilibrium to the left, removing carbonic acid and increasing pH. It is the physical reaction (carbon dioxide leaving solution) and not the loss of carbonic acid that causes the eruption.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: The physical characteristics of Mentos (surface roughness) have the effect of drastically reducing the activation energy for carbon dioxide bubble formation so that the nucleation rate becomes exceedingly high. The activation energy for the release of carbon dioxide from Diet Coke by the addition of Mentos is 25 kJ mol. The foaming is aided by the presence of food additives such as potassium benzoate, aspartame, sugars, and flavorings in Diet Coke, all of which influence the degree to which water can foam. It has been claimed that gelatin and gum arabic in the Mentos candy enhance the fountain, but experiments have shown that these candy additives do not affect the fountain.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: The nucleation reaction can start with any heterogeneous surface, such as rock salt, but Mentos have been found to work better than most. Tonya Coffey, a physicist at Appalachian State University, suggested that aspartame in diet drinks lowers the surface tension in the water and causes a bigger reaction, but that caffeine does not accelerate the process. It has also been shown that a wide variety of beverage additives such as sugars, citric acid, and natural flavors can also enhance fountain heights. In some cases, dissolved solids that increase the surface tension of water (such as sugars) also increase fountain heights. It has also been demonstrated that addition of certain concentrations of alcohol (which lowers surface tension) to carbonated beverages decreases fountain heights. These results suggest that additives serve to enhance geyser heights not by decreasing surface tension, but rather by decreasing bubble coalescence. Decreased bubble coalescence leads to smaller bubble sizes and greater foaming ability in the water. Thus, the geyser reaction will still work even using sugared drinks, but diet is commonly used both for the sake of a larger geyser as well as to avoid having to clean up the stickier residue left by a sugared soda.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: Additional explanations for why diet sodas outperform regular sodas in this experiment have been proposed. For example, it has been suggested that the higher viscosity of regular sodas as compared to diet sodas could inhibit the formation of the fountain in regular sodas, leading to shorter fountains. It has also been suggested that the more stable foams observed in diet sodas as compared to regular sodas could contribute to the taller geysers observed in diet sodas.


title: Diet Coke and Mentos eruption

text: While Diet Coke and Mentos are the most common way to make a soda geyser, they are not the only options. Many consider Diet Coke to be the optimal option, and it's been studied and confirmed as having the strongest effect. However, any carbonated beverage will work. As for the Mentos, many things work to nucleate carbonated beverages such as other candy, metal and ceramic spheres, and even sand.


title: Bryozoa

text: Bryozoa (also known as the Polyzoa, Ectoprocta or commonly as moss animals) are a phylum of simple, aquatic invertebrate animals, nearly all living in sedentary colonies. Typically about long, they have a special feeding structure called a lophophore, a "crown" of tentacles used for filter feeding. Most marine bryozoans live in tropical waters, but a few are found in oceanic trenches and polar waters. The bryozoans are classified as the marine bryozoans (Stenolaemata), freshwater bryozoans (Phylactolaemata), and mostly-marine bryozoans (Gymnolaemata), a few members of which prefer brackish water. 5,869living species are known. At least, two genera are solitary ("Aethozooides" and "Monobryozoon"); all the rest are colonial.


title: Bryozoa

text: The terms "Polyzoa" and "Bryozoa" were introduced a year apart, in 1830 and 1831 respectively. Soon after it was named, another group of animals was discovered whose filtering mechanism looked similar, so it was included in Bryozoa until 1869, when the two groups were noted to be very different internally. The new group was given the name "Entoprocta", while the original Bryozoa were called "Ectoprocta". Disagreements about terminology persisted well into the 20th century, but "Bryozoa" is now the generally accepted term.


title: Bryozoa

text: Colonies take a variety of forms, including fans, bushes and sheets. Single animals, called zooids, live throughout the colony and are not fully independent. These individuals can have unique and diverse functions. All colonies have "autozooids", which are responsible for feeding, excretion, and supplying nutrients to the colony through diverse channels. Some classes have specialist zooids like hatcheries for fertilized eggs, colonial defence structures, and root-like attachment structures. Cheilostomata is the most diverse order of bryozoan, possibly because its members have the widest range of specialist zooids. They have mineralized exoskeletons and form single-layered sheets which encrust over surfaces, and some colonies can creep very slowly by using spiny defensive zooids as legs.


title: Bryozoa

text: Each zooid consists of a "cystid", which provides the body wall and produces the exoskeleton, and a "polypide", which holds the organs. Zooids have no special excretory organs, and autozooids' polypides are scrapped when they become overloaded with waste products; usually the body wall then grows a replacement polypide. Their gut is U-shaped, with the mouth inside the crown of tentacles and the anus outside it. Zooids of all the freshwater species are simultaneous hermaphrodites. Although those of many marine species function first as males and then as females, their colonies always contain a combination of zooids that are in their male and female stages. All species emit sperm into the water. Some also release ova into the water, while others capture sperm via their tentacles to fertilize their ova internally. In some species the larvae have large yolks, go to feed, and quickly settle on a surface. Others produce larvae that have little yolk but swim and feed for a few days before settling. After settling, all larvae undergo a radical metamorphosis that destroys and rebuilds almost all the internal tissues. Freshwater species also produce statoblasts that lie dormant until conditions are favorable, which enables a colony's lineage to survive even if severe conditions kill the mother colony.


title: Bryozoa

text: Predators of marine bryozoans include sea slugs (nudibranchs), fish, sea urchins, pycnogonids, crustaceans, mites and starfish. Freshwater bryozoans are preyed on by snails, insects, and fish. In Thailand, many populations of one freshwater species have been wiped out by an introduced species of snail. A fast-growing invasive bryozoan off the northeast and northwest coasts of the US has reduced kelp forests so much that it has affected local fish and invertebrate populations. Bryozoans have spread diseases to fish farms and fishermen. Chemicals extracted from a marine bryozoan species have been investigated for treatment of cancer and Alzheimer's disease, but analyses have not been encouraging.


title: Bryozoa

text: Mineralized skeletons of bryozoans first appear in rocks from the Early Ordovician period, making it the last major phylum to appear in the fossil record. This has led researchers to suspect that bryozoans arose earlier but were initially unmineralized, and may have differed significantly from fossilized and modern forms. In 2021, some research suggested "Protomelission", a genus known from the Cambrian period, could be an example of an early bryozoan. Early fossils are mainly of erect forms, but encrusting forms gradually became dominant. It is uncertain whether the phylum is monophyletic. Bryozoans' evolutionary relationships to other phyla are also unclear, partly because scientists' view of the family tree of animals is mainly influenced by better-known phyla. Both morphological and molecular phylogeny analyses disagree over bryozoans' relationships with entoprocts, about whether bryozoans should be grouped with brachiopods and phoronids in Lophophorata, and whether bryozoans should be considered protostomes or deuterostomes.


title: Bryozoa

text: Bryozoans, phoronids and brachiopods strain food out of the water by means of a lophophore, a "crown" of hollow tentacles. Bryozoans form colonies consisting of clones called zooids that are typically about long. Phoronids resemble bryozoan zooids but are long and, although they often grow in clumps, do not form colonies consisting of clones. Brachiopods, generally thought to be closely related to bryozoans and phoronids, are distinguished by having shells rather like those of bivalves. All three of these phyla have a coelom, an internal cavity lined by mesothelium.


title: Bryozoa

text: Some encrusting bryozoan colonies with mineralized exoskeletons look very like small corals. However, bryozoan colonies are founded by an ancestrula, which is round rather than shaped like a normal zooid of that species. On the other hand, the founding polyp of a coral has a shape like that of its daughter polyps, and coral zooids have no coelom or lophophore.


title: Bryozoa

text: Entoprocts, another phylum of filter-feeders, look rather like bryozoans but their lophophore-like feeding structure has solid tentacles, their anus lies inside rather than outside the base of the "crown" and they have no coelom.


title: Bryozoa

text: All bryozoans are colonial except for one genus, "Monobryozoon". Individual members of a bryozoan colony are about long and are known as "zooids", since they are not fully independent animals. All colonies contain feeding zooids, known as autozooids. Those of some groups also contain non-feeding heterozooids, also known as polymorphic zooids, which serve a variety of functions other than feeding; colony members are genetically identical and co-operate, rather like the organs of larger animals. What type of zooid grows where in a colony is determined by chemical signals from the colony as a whole or sometimes in response to the scent of predators or rival colonies.


title: Bryozoa

text: The bodies of all types have two main parts. The "cystid" consists of the body wall and whatever type of exoskeleton is secreted by the epidermis. The exoskeleton may be organic (chitin, polysaccharide or protein) or made of the mineral calcium carbonate. The body wall consists of the epidermis, basal lamina (a mat of non-cellular material), connective tissue, muscles, and the mesothelium which lines the coelom (main body cavity) – except that in one class, the mesothelium is split into two separate layers, the inner one forming a membranous sac that floats freely and contains the coelom, and the outer one attached to the body wall and enclosing the membranous sac in a pseudocoelom. The other main part of the bryozoan body, known as the "polypide" and situated almost entirely within the cystid, contains the nervous system, digestive system, some specialized muscles and the feeding apparatus or other specialized organs that take the place of the feeding apparatus.


title: Bryozoa

text: The most common type of zooid is the feeding autozooid, in which the polypide bears a "crown" of hollow tentacles called a lophophore, which captures food particles from the water. In all colonies a large percentage of zooids are autozooids, and some consist entirely of autozooids, some of which also engage in reproduction.


title: Bryozoa

text: The basic shape of the "crown" is a full circle. Among the freshwater bryozoans (Phylactolaemata) the crown appears U-shaped, but this impression is created by a deep dent in the rim of the crown, which has no gap in the fringe of tentacles. The sides of the tentacles bear fine hairs called cilia, whose beating drives a water current from the tips of the tentacles to their bases, where it exits. Food particles that collide with the tentacles are trapped by mucus, and further cilia on the inner surfaces of the tentacles move the particles towards the mouth in the center. The method used by ectoprocts is called "upstream collecting", as food particles are captured before they pass through the field of cilia that creates the feeding current. This method is also used by phoronids, brachiopods and pterobranchs.


title: Bryozoa

text: The lophophore and mouth are mounted on a flexible tube called the "invert", which can be turned inside-out and withdrawn into the polypide, rather like the finger of a rubber glove; in this position the lophophore lies inside the invert and is folded like the spokes of an umbrella. The invert is withdrawn, sometimes within 60milliseconds, by a pair of retractor muscles that are anchored at the far end of the cystid. Sensors at the tips of the tentacles may check for signs of danger before the invert and lophophore are fully extended. Extension is driven by an increase in internal fluid pressure, which species with flexible exoskeletons produce by contracting circular muscles that lie just inside the body wall, while species with a membranous sac use circular muscles to squeeze this. Some species with rigid exoskeletons have a flexible membrane that replaces part of the exoskeleton, and transverse muscles anchored on the far side of the exoskeleton increase the fluid pressure by pulling the membrane inwards. In others there is no gap in the protective skeleton, and the transverse muscles pull on a flexible sac which is connected to the water outside by a small pore; the expansion of the sac increases the pressure inside the body and pushes the invert and lophophore out. In some species the retracted invert and lophophore are protected by an operculum ("lid"), which is closed by muscles and opened by fluid pressure. In one class, a hollow lobe called the "epistome" overhangs the mouth.


title: Bryozoa

text: The gut is U-shaped, running from the mouth, in the center of the lophophore, down into the animal's interior and then back to the anus, which is located on the invert, outside and usually below the lophophore. A network of strands of mesothelium called "funiculi" ("little ropes") connects the mesothelium covering the gut with that lining the body wall. The wall of each strand is made of mesothelium, and surrounds a space filled with fluid, thought to be blood. A colony's zooids are connected, enabling autozooids to share food with each other and with any non-feeding heterozooids. The method of connection varies between the different classes of bryozoans, ranging from quite large gaps in the body walls to small pores through which nutrients are passed by funiculi.


title: Bryozoa

text: There is a nerve ring round the pharynx (throat) and a ganglion that serves as a brain to one side of this. Nerves run from the ring and ganglion to the tentacles and to the rest of the body. Bryozoans have no specialized sense organs, but cilia on the tentacles act as sensors. Members of the genus "Bugula" grow towards the sun, and therefore must be able to detect light. In colonies of some species, signals are transmitted between zooids through nerves that pass through pores in the body walls, and coordinate activities such as feeding and the retraction of lophophores.


title: Bryozoa

text: The solitary individuals of "Monobryozoon" are autozooids with pear-shaped bodies. The wider ends have up to 15 short, muscular projections by which the animals anchor themselves to sand or gravel and pull themselves through the sediments.


title: Bryozoa

text: Some authorities use the term "avicularia" (plural of "avicularium") to refer to any type of zooid in which the lophophore is replaced by an extension that serves some protective function, while others restrict the term to those that defend the colony by snapping at invaders and small predators, killing some and biting the appendages of others. In some species the snapping zooids are mounted on a peduncle (stalk), their bird-like appearance responsible for the term – Charles Darwin described these as like "the head and beak of a vulture in miniature, seated on a neck and capable of movement". Stalked avicularia are placed upside-down on their stalks. The "lower jaws" are modified versions of the opercula that protect the retracted lophophores in autozooids of some species, and are snapped shut "like a mousetrap" by similar muscles, while the beak-shaped upper jaw is the inverted body wall. In other species the avicularia are stationary box-like zooids laid the normal way up, so that the modified operculum snaps down against the body wall. In both types the modified operculum is opened by other muscles that attach to it, or by internal muscles that raise the fluid pressure by pulling on a flexible membrane. The actions of these snapping zooids are controlled by small, highly modified polypides that are located inside the "mouth" and bear tufts of short sensory cilia. These zooids appear in various positions: some take the place of autozooids, some fit into small gaps between autozooids, and small avicularia may occur on the surfaces of other zooids.


title: Bryozoa

text: In vibracula, regarded by some as a type of avicularia, the operculum is modified to form a long bristle that has a wide range of motion. They may function as defenses against predators and invaders, or as cleaners. In some species that form mobile colonies, vibracula around the edges are used as legs for burrowing and walking.


title: Bryozoa

text: Kenozooids (from the Greek 'empty') consist only of the body wall and funicular strands crossing the interior, and no polypide. The functions of these zooids include forming the stems of branching structures, acting as spacers that enable colonies to grow quickly in a new direction, strengthening the colony's branches, and elevating the colony slightly above its substrate for competitive advantages against other organisms. Some kenozooids are hypothesized to be capable of storing nutrients for the colony. Because kenozooids' function is generally structural, they are called "structural polymorphs."


title: Bryozoa

text: Some heterozooids found in extinct trepostome bryozoans, called mesozooids, are thought to have functioned to space the feeding autozooids an appropriate distance apart. In thin sections of trepostome fossils, mesozooids can be seen in between the tubes that held autozooids; they are smaller tubes that are divided along their length by diaphragms, making them look like rows of box-like chambers sandwiched between autozooidal tubes.