who has given the concept of functional alternatives

According to Merton's perception of "functionalism", all standardized social and cultural beliefs and practices are functional for both society as a whole as well as individuals in society. This outlook maintains that various parts of social systems must show a high level of integration, but Merton argues that a generalization like this cannot be extended to larger, more complex societies. The second claim has to do with universal functionalism. This claim argues that all standardized social and cultural structures and forms have a positive function. Merton argues that this is a contradiction to what is seen in the real world; not every structure, idea, belief, etc., has positive functions. The third claim of functional analysis that Merton argues with is that of indispensability. This claim states that the standardized parts of society have positive functions, and also represent indispensable parts of the working whole, which implies that structures and functions are functionally necessary for society. Here, Merton argues, people must be willing to admit that there exist various structural and functional alternatives within society.[22]

Robert K. Merton

Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick; 5 July 1910 â€“ 23 February 2003) was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.[1][2] He is considered a founding father of modern sociology while also gaining a status for the work he contributed to criminology.

Merton developed notable concepts such as "unintended consequences", the "reference group", and "role strain", but is perhaps best known for the terms "role model" and "self-fulfilling prophecy".[3] A central element in modern sociological, political, and economic theory, a self-fulfilling prophecy is one type of process through which a belief or expectation affects the outcome of a situation or the way a person or group will behave.[4][5] Defined by Merton, "The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior, which makes the originally false conception come true."[6]

Merton's work on the "role model" first appeared in a study on the socialization of medical students at Columbia University. The term grew from his theory of the reference group, the group to which individuals compare themselves but to which they do not necessarily belong. Social roles were central to Merton's theory of social groups. Merton emphasized that, rather than a person assuming one role and one status, they have a status set in the social structure that has, attached to it, a whole set of expected behaviors.[7]

Robert K. Merton was born on 4 July 1910 in Philadelphia as Meyer Robert Schkolnick[8] into a family of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who had immigrated to the United States in 1904. His mother was Ida Rasovskaya, an "unsynagogued" socialist who had freethinking radical sympathies. His father was Aaron Schkolnickoff, a tailor who had officially been registered at his United States port of entry as "Harrie Skolnick".[9] Merton's family lived in straitened circumstances after his father's uninsured dairy-product shop in South Philadelphia burned down. The father later became a carpenter's assistant to support the family. Even though Merton grew up fairly poor, however, he believed that he had been afforded many opportunities.[10]

As a student at South Philadelphia High School, he was a frequent visitor to nearby cultural and educational venues, including the Andrew Carnegie Library, the Academy of Music, the Central Library, and the Museum of Arts. He adopted the name Robert K. Merton initially as a stage name for his magic performances.[9] In 1994 Merton stated that growing up in South Philadelphia provided young people with "every sort of capital—social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and, above all, what we may call public capital—that is, with every sort of capital except the personally financial."[11]

Young Merton developed a strong interest in magic, heavily influenced by his sister's boyfriend. For his magic acts he initially chose the stage name "Merlin", but he eventually settled on the surname "Merton" in order to further "Americanize" his immigrant-family name. He picked the given name "Robert" in honor of the 19th-century French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, widely considered the father of modern-style conjuring. Thus his stage name became "Robert Merton", and he kept it as his personal name on receiving a scholarship to Temple University.[12]

He started his sociological career under the guidance of George E. Simpson at Philadelphia's Temple University (1927–31). Merton's work as Simpson's research assistant on a project dealing with race and media introduced Merton to sociology. Under Simpson's leadership, Merton attended an American Sociological Association annual meeting where he met Pitrim A. Sorokin, the founding chair of the Harvard University Sociology Department. Merton applied to Harvard and went to work as a research assistant to Sorokin (1931–36).[13]

Many had doubted that Merton would be accepted into Harvard after graduating from Temple, but he quickly defied the odds and by his second year he had begun publishing with Sorokin. By 1934 he had even begun publishing articles of his own: "Recent French Sociology", "The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 700-1300 A.D.", "Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention", and "Science and Military Technique". After completing these, Merton went on to graduate from Harvard with an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology. By the end of his student career in 1938, he had already begun to embark on works that made him renowned in the sociological field, publishing his first major study, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, which helped create the sociology of science.[12] The Merton Thesis, proposes similar to Max Weber's famous claim on the link between Protestant ethic and the capitalist economy, a positive correlation between the rise of Protestant Pietism, Puritanism and early experimental science.[14]

He taught at Harvard until 1938, when he became professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Tulane University. In 1941 he joined the Columbia University faculty, where he spent the vast majority of his teaching career. Over his five decades at Columbia University he held numerous prestigious titles. He was associate director of the university's Bureau of Applied Social Research from 1942 to 1971, and named Giddings Professor of Sociology in 1963. He was also named to the university's highest academic rank, University Professor, in 1974 and became a Special Service Professor, a title reserved by the trustees for emeritus faculty who "render special services to the University", upon his retirement in 1979. He was an adjunct faculty member at Rockefeller University and was also the first Foundation Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.[15] He withdrew from teaching in 1984. In recognition of his lasting contributions to scholarship and the university, Columbia established the Robert K. Merton Professorship in the Social Sciences in 1990.[15]

Over his career, Merton published some 50 papers in the sociology of science. However, that was not the only field to which he contributed his ideas and theories. Among many other fields and topics were deviance theory, organizations, and middle-range theory.[16]

Merton received many national and international honors for his research. He was one of the first sociologists elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the first American sociologist to be elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He was also a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded him its Parsons Prize, the National Academy of Education and Academica Europaea.[15] Merton is also credited as the creator of the focus group research method.[8]

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and was the first sociologist to be named a MacArthur Fellow (1983–88). More than twenty universities awarded him honorary degrees, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Chicago, and abroad, the Universities of Leyden, Wales, Oslo and Kraków, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford.[15]

In 1994, Merton was awarded the US National Medal of Science, for "founding the sociology of science and for his pioneering contributions to the study of social life, especially the self-fulfilling prophecy and the unintended consequences of social action".[17] He was the first sociologist to receive the prize.[15]

In 1934, Merton married Suzanne Carhart, with whom he had one son, Robert C. Merton, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics, and two daughters, Stephanie Merton Tombrello and Vanessa Merton, a professor of law at Pace University School of Law. Merton and Carhart separated in 1968 and she died in 1992. Merton married his fellow sociologist Harriet Zuckerman in 1993. She also was his collaborator. On February 23, 2003, Merton died at the age of 92 in New York. At the time of his death, he resided in Manhattan. He is survived by his wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.[18]

Merton's work is often compared to that of Talcott Parsons. Merton enrolled in Parsons' theory course while at Harvard, and he admired Parsons' work because it introduced him to European methods of theory, while also broadening his own idea and conclusions about sociology. However, unlike Parsons, who emphasized the necessity for social science to establish a general foundation, Merton preferred more limited, middle-range theories. Merton later explained in his writings, "although much impressed by Parsons as a master-builder of sociological theory, I found myself departing from his mode of theorizing (as well as his mode of exposition)."[12]

Merton himself fashioned his theory very similarly to that of Emile Durkheim in his work Suicide or Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Merton believed that middle range theories bypassed the failures of larger theories because they are too distant from observing social behavior in a particular social setting.[19] According to Merton, middle-range theory starts its theorizing with clearly defined aspects of social phenomena, rather than with broad, abstract entities such as society as a whole. Theories of the middle range should be firmly supported by empirical data. These theories must be constructed with observed data in order to create theoretical problems and to be incorporated in proposals that allow empirical testing.[20] Middle-range theories, applicable to limited ranges of data, transcend sheer description of social phenomena and fill in the blanks between raw empiricism and grand or all-inclusive theory.

Merton argued that general strain theory is developed by this blockage in an individual’s life which doesn’t allow them to achieve their goal, essentially leading to deviant behaviour. Merton uses the progress of achieving the ‘American Dream’ as an example. If an individual can’t achieve this, it can prove frustrating for the individual and may lead to breaking free into illegal escape routes or anger-based delinquency. This theory has many criticisms as it doesn’t factor in an individual’s social class as someone as a lower socio-economic level might not be striving to achieving the ‘American Dream’ meaning they don’t need to carry out illegal acts. This also creates the idea that only people that fall under the bracket of the lower socio-economic are the only ones that will become a criminal and people that have achieved the ‘American Dream’ won’t which is simply incorrect.[21]

Merton argues that the central orientation of functionalism is in interpreting data by their consequences for larger structures in which they are implicated. Like Durkheim and Parsons he analyzes society with reference to whether cultural and social structures are well or badly integrated. Merton is also interested in the persistence of societies and defines functions that make for the adaptation of a given social system. He believed that the way these early functionalists put emphasis [vice "emphasize"] on functions of one social structure or institution for another, created bias when focusing only on adaptation or adjustment because they would always have a positive consequence.[22] Finally, Merton thinks that shared values are central in explaining how societies and institutions work, however he disagrees with Parsons on some issues.

His belief in empirical testing led to the development of his "paradigm" of functional analysis.[22] According to Merton, "paradigm", refers to "exemplars of codified basic and often tacit assumptions, problem sets, key concepts, logic of procedure, and selectively accumulated knowledge that guide [theoretical and empirical] inquiry in all scientific fields".[7] In terms of structural functionalism, Merton felt that the focus should be on social functions rather than on individual motives.[22]

Merton emphasizes the existence of dysfunctions. Merton elaborates on his three main issues or flaws with functionalism, which he labels postulates. His identified faults are distinguished as: the postulate of the functional unity of society, the postulate of universal functionalism, and the postulate of indispensability.

The postulate of the functional unity of society refers to the misunderstanding that societies are functional and harmonious unions. Merton points out that not all societies are happy and well-integrated, where the people function well together and all involved prosper. Merton cites examples, such as civil wars, African-Americans in the 1950s and South African blacks during the apartheid regime as instances where societies were not necessarily functional for all people.

The postulate of universal functionalism disproves the idea that not all ideals work for everyone in a society. Merton believes that some things may have consequences that are generally dysfunctional or which are dysfunctional for some and functional for others. For example, poverty may benefit the rich because they are allowed to maintain more of their wealth, but it certainly does not benefit the poor who struggle. On this point he approaches conflict theory, although he does believe that institutions and values can be functional for society as a whole. Merton states that only by recognizing the dysfunctional aspects of institutions, can we explain the development and persistence of alternatives. Merton's concept of dysfunctions is also central to his argument that functionalism is not essentially conservative.

Lastly, the postulate of indispensability challenges the social function for customs, ideals, or institutions as a whole. Merton raises the question and doubt of whether every social institution performs a specific function. Merton believes that several institutions can provide the same function or none at all, so it is impossible to decipher what functions are vital or not to a society.[19]

In Merton's writing on dysfunctions, he highlighted problems that tend to keep social systems from meeting all of their functional requirements. In doing this, he was able to point out the details as well as the contradictions of the overall concept. One group's function could serve as another group's dysfunction, and a general incident could turn out to be both functional and dysfunctional for the same group. Merton clarified the concept by stating that a certain degree of social cohesion eases the productivity of a group and is therefore functional, but it can become dysfunctional when it surpasses a certain threshold, because then the members of the group may become equally indulgent and fail to hold each other to high performance standards.[7]

In order to help people determine whether positive functions outweigh dysfunctions, and vice versa, Merton developed the concept of net balance. Because the issues are complex and based on a lot of subjective judgement, they cannot be calculated and weighed easily. Therefore, positive functions and dysfunctions cannot be simply added up and objectively determine which outweighs the other. In order to deal with these issues, Merton believed that there must be levels of functional analysis. Rather than solely focusing on the analysis of society as a whole, Merton argued that analysis could and should also be done on an organization, institution or group.[22]

Some of the crucial innovations that Merton made to sociology include the description of the unanticipated consequences of social action, of latent functions vs. manifest functions, and, as previously mentioned, of dysfunctions.[7] According to Merton, unanticipated consequences are actions that have both intended and unintended consequences. Everyone is aware of the intended consequences, but the unintended are more difficult to recognize, and therefore, sociological analysis is required to uncover what they may be.[22] In his 1936 essay, "The Unanticipated Consequences of Social Action", Merton uncovered the wide field of human activity where things do not go as planned, and paradoxes and strange outcomes are seen. One of these outcomes is the "self-defeating prophecy", which through the very fact of its being publicized, is actually wrong. Merton was able to illustrate this by referencing Karl Marx's prediction that as societies become more modern, the wealth will be concentrated amongst fewer people, and the majority of society would suffer from poverty and misery. This prediction helped to stimulate the socialist movement, which in some countries slowed the development that Marx had predicted.[7] The opposite of the "self-defeating prophecy" then, is the "self-fulfilling prophecy", when an originally unfounded prophecy turns out to be correct because it is believed and acted upon.[7]

Manifest functions are the consequences that people observe or expect, or what is intended; latent functions are those that are neither recognized nor intended. In distinguishing between manifest and latent functions, Merton argued that one must dig to discover latent functions. His example from his 1949 piece, "Manifest and Latent Functions", was an analysis of political machines. Merton began by describing the negative consequences of political machines, and then changed the angle and demonstrated how the people in charge of the machines, acting in their own interest, were meeting the social needs not met by government institutions.[7]

Merton made it very clear however, that unanticipated consequences and latent functions are not the same. Latent functions are one type of unanticipated consequences; functional for the designated system. According to Merton, there are also two other types of unanticipated consequences: "those that are dysfunctional for a designated system, and these comprise the latent dysfunctions, and those which are irrelevant to the system which they affect neither functionally or dysfunctionally... non-functional consequences".[22]

Merton sees attention to latent functions as increasing the understanding of society: the distinction between manifest and latent forces the sociologist to go beyond the reasons individuals give for their actions or for the existence of customs and institutions; it makes them look for other social consequences that allow these practices' survival and illuminate the way society works.

Functionalists believe societies must have certain characteristics in order to survive. Merton shares this view but stresses that at the same time particular institutions are not the only ones able to fulfill these functions; a wide range of functional alternatives may be able to perform the same task. This notion of functional alternative is important because it alerts sociologists to the similar functions different institutions may perform and it further reduces the tendency of functionalism to imply approval of the status quo.

Merton's theory on deviance stems from his 1938 analysis of the relationship between culture, structure and anomie. Merton defines culture as an "organized set of normative values governing behavior which is common to members of a designated society or group". Social structures are the "organized set of social relationships in which members of the society or group are variously implicated".[20] Anomie, the state of normlessness, arises when there is "an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them".[20] In his theory, Merton links anomie with deviance and argues that the discontinuity between culture and structure have the dysfunctional consequence of leading to deviance within society.[22]

The term anomie, derived from Émile Durkheim, for Merton means a discord between cultural goals and the legitimate means available to reach them.[23] Applied to the United States, he sees the American dream as an emphasis on the goal of monetary success, but without a corresponding emphasis on the legitimate avenues to attaining the Dream. In other words, Merton believes that the American Dream is a cultural ideal, but the ways in which people go about obtaining it are not the same. This can lead to a considerable amount of deviance (in the Parsonian sense). This theory is commonly used in the study of criminology (specifically the strain theory).

In this rubric, conformity refers to the attaining of societal goals by socially accepted means, while innovation refers to the attaining of those goals in unaccepted ways (such as crime and deviance). Innovators find and create their own ways to obtain what they want, and a majority of the time, these new means are considered to be socially unaccepted and deviant. Merton considers ritualism the acceptance of the means but the forfeit of the goals. Ritualists continue to subscribe to the means, but they have rejected the overall goal; they are not viewed as deviant. Retreatism is the rejection of both the means and the goals. Retreaters want to find a way to escape from everything and therefore reject both the goals and the means and are seen as deviant. Rebellion differs from the other four approaches in a number of ways. Temporally, rebellion is a short-term response (unlike the other four). Like retreaters, rebels reject both existing societal goals and means, but unlike retreaters, rebels work at the macro level to replace those existing societal goals and means with new goals and means embodying other values. Innovation and ritualism are the pure cases of anomie as Merton defined it because in both cases there is a contradiction or discontinuity between goals and means.

The sociology of science was a field that Merton was very interested in and remained very passionate about throughout his career. Merton was interested in the interactions and importance between social and cultural structures and science. For example, he did pioneering historical research in his PhD dissertation on the role of military institutions in stimulating scientific research during the era of the Scientific Revolution. Merton carried out extensive research into the sociology of science, developing the Merton Thesis explaining some of the religious causes of the Scientific Revolution, and the Mertonian norms of science, often referred to by the acronym "Cudos". This is a set of ideals that are dictated by what Merton takes to be the goals and methods of science and to be binding on scientists. They include:

The CUDOS set of Mertonian scientific norms is sometimes identified as Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, *Originality* (novelty in research contributions), and Skepticism (instead of Organized Skepticism). This is a subsequent modification of Merton's norm set, as he did not refer to Originality in the essay that introduced the norms (The Normative Structure of Science [1942]).

Merton introduced many concepts to the sociology of science, including "obliteration by incorporation" (when a concept becomes so popularized that its inventor is forgotten) and "multiples" (on independent similar discoveries).

Merton and his colleagues spent much time studying "how the social system of science works in accordance with, and often also in contradiction to, the ethos of science".[7] This newer focus on the social organization of science led Merton to study the reward system in science, priority disputes between scientists, and the way in which famous scientists often receive disproportionate credit for their contributions, while less-known scientists receive less credit than their contributions merit.[7] Merton called this phenomenon the "Matthew effect"; see also Stigler's law of eponymy. As a result of the Matilda effect, Harriet Zuckerman is credited by Merton as co-author of the Matthew effect.[25]

With his study of the Matthew effect, Merton showed how the social system of science sometimes deviated structurally from the ethos of science, in this case by violating the norm of universalism:[7] a few top scientists enjoying large chunks of awards, grants and jobs, and the spread and distribution of resources and recognition among scientists being highly skewed.[26]

Merton referred to his book On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript as "OTSOG"â€”"part parody and part history of ideas" according to the publisher. In OTSOG, he traces the history of Newton's famous comment "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"[27] back to centuries earlier, in the rambling style of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.[28]

Merton was heavily influenced by Talcott Parsons and to a much lesser degree of Pitirim Sorokin. Indeed, Merton's choice of dissertation topic reflect profoundly the interest from Parsons and was not of Sorokin's liking. Hence, Sorokin was strongly opposed to the emphasis of the creativity of Puritanism, which was a central element in Merton's discussion. Merton, however, managed to have both men on his dissertation committee.[29] Merton worked with Sorokin as a graduate student at Harvard University.[30] However, intellectuals like Paul Lazarsfeld influenced Merton to occupy himself with middle-range theories. Yet Merton's general theoretical perspectives were much closer to Parsons than Sorokin. He was also influenced by Lawrence Joseph Henderson, L.J., who taught him something about the disciplined investigation of what is first entertained as an interesting idea. E.F. Gay also played a role in Merton's thought, as did the famous historian of science George Sarton, who allowed Merton to work with him at Harvard and is believed to have inspired Merton to have interest in science.[31] Émile Durkheim and Georg Simmel also greatly contributed to Merton's understanding of sociology and to his own ideas.[22]

Today, Merton is viewed as one of the founding fathers of modern-day sociology. His works are seen as the driving force of many of today's sociologists' studies. Merton's friends and colleagues credit his guidance to the positive direction of modern sociology as well. In particular, Columbia provost Jonathan R. Cole who studied under Merton praised him shortly after his death, saying:

Bob Merton became the leader of structural-functional analysis in sociology, and the leader of those sociologists who attempted to create social theories that could be empirically tested. He was an inspirational teacher and editor, and with his students, such as James S. Coleman and Seymour Martin Lipset, among many others who would become leading figures in the field, he helped to build and legitimate the field of sociology in America. For me, he was a model teacher and mentor, a trusted colleague, and a close friend. His death, in many ways, puts a period at the end of 20th Century sociology.[12]

Through his theory and research during his many decades as a sociologist, Merton essentially created and sustained what is the modern sociology of science.[citation needed]


his character on home improvement is tim the toolman taylor

Timothy "Tim" Taylor (Tim Allen) – Tim Taylor (the character has a birth date of October 1954) is the father of the family. Ever the know-it-all, Tim believes he has an incredibly wide knowledge of tools, electronics, and general mechanics. In reality, he is highly accident-prone. He actually does have a significant amount of skill as a general handyman, but can be overly confident and prone to spectacular mishaps. He often forgets a crucial step, ignores instructions, makes ill-advised modifications, or comes to inaccurate conclusions. The only exception to this ineptitude is when working on cars, at which he excels. He is left-handed but actually does a great deal of his work with his right hand. Taylor's "arch enemy", so to speak, was the real-life home improvement specialist, Bob Vila. One episode saw Tim competing against Bob Vila in a lawnmower contest for charity. Tim actually installed a jet engine on his machine-which resulted in Tim causing unintended chaos and destruction. Tim hosts a home improvement show called Tool Time with his co-host and friend, Al Borland. While Al is his co-host, Al constantly must remind Tim of safety regulations and practices. Tim often ignores Al's advice, and this frequently results in an accident. While it is constantly mentioned that Tool Time is a limited local home improvement show that sits very high on the channel dial, Tool Time seems to have a very wide audience in the state of Michigan, and is progressively broadcast to more outlets across the Midwest (A season 5 episode has Tim, Al, and Bud brainstorming for ideas on how to bring the show into the Chicago markets). Tim often boasts at his popularity for hosting the show, although many people state that they like Al better. A running gag involves people encountering Tim in public and stating, "Oh, we always watch Tool Time...we love Al." To which an annoyed Tim would reply, "Oh yeah, we all love Al." In later seasons, however, it is learned that Tim actually has a higher fan base than Al.

List of Home Improvement characters

This article contains character information for the American television sitcom Home Improvement.

Because of the numerous accidents in which he is involved, both on his TV show and at home, it is a recurring joke that Tim is on a first name basis with the hospital staff, and it is often suggested that Tim has special offers available to him for being a repeat customer. Another gag is that Tool Time fans believe his many accidents are staged, to show people what not to do. However, many of Tim's modified inventions work but are often too powerful, like his new ice cube dispenser in season 2. Tim often garbles advice he heard from Wilson and/or otherwise makes stupid remarks – although on one episode Tim stuns Jill and Wilson by putting forth sound advice of his own. Another running gag is Tim accidentally causing damage or destruction to anything he touches – such as destroying the world's smallest car or running over golf carts with a Marine Corps tank. Tim has an unhealthy obsession with Halloween and Christmas, going to extraordinary lengths to scare others and competing with "Doc Johnson" in the annual neighborhood Christmas lighting contest, which he has rarely won.

While Tim has a very good relationship with his wife, he is quick to admit defeat in any conflict they become engaged in. He also works hard to maintain healthy relationships with his three sons, although he relates more closely to Brad than Randy or Mark.

Tim is occasionally chauvinistic in attitude, usually putting women down or sometimes seeing them as inferior(But he often must absorb the same insults against men from Jill). He also tends to mock those who are overweight, such as Al's mother or his mother-in-law (until she loses weight), and can be juvenile in attitude on many occasions. A running gag involves Jill's distaste for his attitude, in that she says "You're pathetic" every time he goes too far. Tim is an avid fan of all the local sports teams; the Detroit Lions, the Detroit Pistons, the Detroit Red Wings, and the Detroit Tigers. He is also a big fan of boxing, the Indy Racing League, and tractor pulls. Many scenes take place in the garage during his favorite hobby, working on one of his two hot rods, one of which he built from the ground up, and the other existing vehicle that he restored.

While he occasionally considers moving on professionally, Tim remains the main host of Tool Time until the final episode of Home Improvement. Before he was cast on Tool Time, he worked as a traveling tool salesman. Tim barely graduated from college, but later receives an honorary Doctorate from Western Michigan University. Tim is famous for his ever-popular noisemaking, which he refers to as a "Simian grunt."

His mother is alive for the entire series, however his father died when Tim was eleven years old. There has always been some disparity between how many brothers Tim has. On several occasions in the later seasons, it is mentioned that Tim has four brothers, but in earlier seasons he is stated to have five, however, seven have been mentioned by name (Marty, Jeff, Rick, John, Steve, Brian, and Danny).

Tim always thinks things need "more power", and is often seen wearing sweaters from Michigan-based colleges. Tim thinks he knows everything there is to know about tools.

Tim is the only character to appear in every single episode. A close second is Jill, who only missed the second part of the series finale (unless one counts the flashbacks shown).

Jillian "Jill" Patterson Taylor (Patricia Richardson) – Jill (born November 1956) is Tim's wife and the mother of Brad, Randy, and Mark. Jill graduated from Adams High School (taken from an actual high school in Rochester Hills, Michigan) in 1973. Jill is intelligent, practical, and has a dry sense of humor that doesn't often fly with her family. After she decides that her career is not fulfilling, Jill dedicates herself toward earning her master's degree in Psychology. While she is very motherly and domestic in nature, she is apparently a very bad cook, as Tim and the three boys often make remarks about her cooking. Her strong femininity is often in direct conflict with Tim's masculinity, occasionally leading her to wonder why they work as a couple.

Jill comes from a strong military family, and sometimes uses her upbringing to solve several family squabbles. Her father was a Colonel in the US Army and is referred to as such. Jill has four sisters, all of whom have appeared: Robin, Carrie, Tracy, and Linda. (A fifth sister, Katie, was briefly mentioned by Jill's mother in the season 2 episode, "Much Ado About Nana", and in the season 4 episode, "Quibbling Siblings", but never again.) She often appears overwhelmed at the fact that she is the only female in a family with three sons and no daughter. She appears closest to her youngest son, Mark, as she remarks a few times that Mark is the only one who still has the ability to be open-minded to accept the things that Jill likes as opposed to being the typical "boy". Early on, she has a temporary job working at a magazine, and later in the series, Jill is a psychology student. She also does a significant amount of volunteer work, especially for the local library.

Jill has a strong feminist side and enjoys opera, theatre, and the ballet. She occasionally tries to be interested in sports and tools but always ends up relating to her husband over his buried sensitivity. Jill also considers it her mission to get Tim, Brad, Randy, and Mark to do the right thing. Jill refers to any or all of her sons, as well as Tim by their full names when she is angry. Jill likes to "match-make", with mixed results, as she did set up Al with Ilene, who were together for a few seasons, and Wilson and one of her professors in another successful relationship. She also has a thing for cars – driving at different times an Austin-Healey 3000 (which Tim hates because he doesn't understand British wiring) and a cherry red Chevy Bel-Air Nomad; in two memorable episodes, Jill is furious with Tim for driving her Healey without permission and for wrecking her Nomad. In other memorable episodes, Jill is extremely angry at Tim when he calls her an "old Hen" on TV and when she finds out he bought $4,000 worth of game tickets for the Detroit Pistons.

Bradley Michael "Brad" Taylor (Zachery Ty Bryan) – (born January 1981) is the oldest, most athletic and strongest of the three boys, once seen throwing Randy around when they got into an argument. While all three boys are portrayed as troublemakers at one point or another, Brad gets into the most serious trouble. He is the only one to have a run-in with the police (after throwing bricks at windows in an abandoned greenhouse) and was once discovered in possession of marijuana, which he admitted to smoking. On the other hand, Brad was the only Taylor son to co-host an episode of Tool Time, and the one seen doing the most extensive work on Tim's Hot Rod, and is the son to which Tim relates to the easiest. Although he often struggled with his school work, he has extraordinary athletic ability, especially playing soccer. Throughout the series, he was offered numerous opportunities to make a career out of soccer, including the offer to play for a professional team in England (the fictitious Birmingham Chubbs). This was rejected when his parents refused to allow him to give up college to play professional soccer. Later in the series, despite a knee injury which threatened to put an end to his athletic pursuits, he earned a college scholarship to UCLA. Brad has a prominent attraction to women, including his mild infatuation with Tool Time's Heidi Keppert. Brad and Tim enjoy working on classic cars.

Brad got along well with Randy, especially early on in the show. The two are often seen working together to tease Mark, attempting to cover up Brad's actions to keep him out of trouble, or just hanging out together. Brad and Mark don't share many things in common until they get older, especially in the 8th season where they develop a close bond while Randy is away in Costa Rica.

Randall William "Randy" Taylor (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) – Randy (born February 8, 1982) is the middle child, ultimately the smartest of the three boys, and frequently the most mischievous troublemaker. Randy's intelligence eventually led to him skipping ahead to advanced math and science classes, and was often the cause of sibling rivalry with Brad. Randy inherited Tim's talents as a jokester. Randy in the later seasons is noticeably a lot shorter than his brothers and his height is often made fun of by Brad. Whenever Tim was in trouble with Jill, Randy was always there with a quick remark that would almost always get him in trouble. Although initially sharing mostly the same interests as Brad and his father, throughout his adolescence Randy became very conscious about the environment and civil rights. He became very skeptical of the intentions of organized religion, especially Christian denominations, and became a vegetarian in later seasons. He wrote for the school newspaper, where he concentrated on social and political issues, including criticizing Binford for its pollution record, which led to a fierce disagreement with Tim. Unlike Brad who dated many different girls, Randy, for the most part, only dated one girl, Lauren, whom he remained with for the rest of the series.

Randy is generally the most level-headed son in the family, although because he is an intelligent boy, he was also prone to arrogance, jealousy, and sometimes a little prejudice. His father has a tendency to dislike and mock anything he has no interest in, such as ballet and opera, and Randy inherited this attitude, which ironically puts him at odds with Tim, since Randy has no interest in cars and tools. Out of all the Taylor boys, Randy is the one with the least respect for his father. He once called his father's show "Fool Time", and compared his father to an ape. When Tim brought Brad onto Tool Time, Randy immediately called it a stupid show and acted hateful towards Tim and Brad. During high school, he wrote a school article that turned many adults against Tim for Binford's pollution record, threatening his father's reputation, and he bitterly disapproved of Brad's jockish article earning the paper's front page, which was usually occupied by Randy's articles. He does however mend his relationships with them after learning the error of his ways.

In the Eighth Season of the show, Randy leaves for Costa Rica (along with Lauren, who stayed in a nearby town), reappearing in only one episode when he came back for Christmas. On that occasion, Randy felt that so much had changed in his absence that he no longer fit in with the family, although confiding in Wilson aided his feelings. Unlike Tim and Brad, Randy is not good with his hands and does not enjoy working on crafts or the Hot Rod. Randy often relates more with his mother, with whom he shares his intelligence and enjoyment of acting (although Tim embarrassed Randy during one acting scene thanks to a malfunctioning stage prop). In another episode Randy's party with friends was ruined due to Tim putting on too many coats of floorwax-which resulted in his girlfriend getting a sprained ankle.

Early on in the show, Brad and Randy were portrayed as "partners in crime". While they did argue like normal brothers, they generally bonded over their mutual enjoyment of teasing Mark. As they got older, they grew apart somewhat, as Randy became more focused on school and social issues and Brad became more focused on athletics and girls.

Early on Randy and Mark generally only get along when united against Brad, though things improved somewhat as they got older.

Marcus Jason "Mark" Taylor (Taran Noah Smith[1]) – Mark (born March 1985) is the youngest and most sensitive of the three boys.[2] He relates very closely with his mother, especially after the first season. He does not share many interests with his brothers or father, and in the early seasons was often the victim due to his naïveté of some practical joke that Brad and Randy had thought up on the spot for him. Mark is not a troublemaker, as he doesn't possess a joking demeanor or even a hint of a mean streak. On the rare occasions that Brad or Randy include him on pranks, Mark often blows their cover by responding to someone when he is not supposed to or divulging too much information. This divulging of information not only gets Brad and Randy in trouble, but often Tim as well, especially when he is trying to keep something he said or did from Jill. During adolescence, Mark began to adopt a more "goth" look and an anti-establishment kind of attitude, the cause of which was founded in his feelings of social isolation. While Mark's darkening demeanor worried Tim and Jill on several occasions, it never turned into anything extremely destructive, although a homemade horror movie he created was a bit more twisted than they expected. His Gothic appearance was gone by the end of the series. Mark enjoys film production and music, took karate and pilot training, and became a proficient cook. During the early seasons of the show Mark is seen in a Cub Scout uniform-sans badges.

Mark's relationship with Brad and Randy was often adversarial, especially in early seasons as he was often the butt of their jokes, pranks and teasing. While Mark never truly bonded with Randy, in the final season Mark and Brad grew very close as the result of the dynamic of their relationship changing when Randy left for Costa Rica. Mark eventually became taller than Randy and later Brad.

Martin "Marty" Taylor (William O'Leary) – Marty (born in 1964) is Tim's youngest brother by ten years. As their father died when Marty was just one year old, Tim is the closest thing he knows to a father. Marty was often picked on by his older brothers, much as Mark is by Brad and Randy. He is often seen bouncing from job to job, unable to hold a steady career. For the majority of the show's run, Marty was married to Nancy (Jensen Daggett), and they had identical twin girls, Gracie and Claire.

Jeffrey "Jeff" Taylor (Thom Sharp) – Jeff is Tim and Marty's oldest brother (exact age unspecified). He is extremely frugal and suffers from male-pattern baldness, both of which make him a frequent target of Tim's jokes. Like Marty, Jeff has trouble maintaining a steady job. It is mentioned that he has made a number of bad business ventures (such as a drive-thru pet store), was divorced twice, and didn't finish college (as mentioned by Jill's sister in one episode). Jeff eventually makes an investment in Tim's hardware store.

Albert E. "Al" Borland (Richard Karn) – A master plumber and licensed contractor, Al is Tim's un-hip sidekick on the show-within-a-show Tool Time and best friend. His personality is an exact opposite of Tim's – he is reserved, quiet, does not show much enthusiasm and has a wide array of professional knowledge concerning tools. Al made frequent suggestions that he should be the host of Tool Time instead of Tim. Al does not make as much money as Tim, in fact it is implied that his salary is not very big at all. In the episode, "Brothers and Sisters", Al says that he gets a very small paycheck. In the episode, "Fifth Anniversary", it is revealed that a big reason why Al was chosen to be Tim's assistant was because Al was the only assistant applicant that was willing to work for the salary that was offered. Al could be characterized as a "mama's boy"; he spent a great deal of time attempting to please his mother Alma – who was severely overweight (though she was never seen). She died from a heart attack near the end of the series after Al asked her permission to marry Trudy. His father was almost 60 when Al was born. Young Al has mechanical talent-constructing a model crane out of wood. Al was engaged to an orthodontist named Ilene for a time, but they ended up calling off the wedding. He also dated Greta Post who appeared a few times in the series. In a later season, Al met a wealthy exterminator named Trudy. They hit it off and were married in the show's final episode. Al might have been based on Norm Abram of This Old House because of the resemblance (flannel shirts, beard, pudgy, etc.) and the fact that Al does all the "real work" on the Tool Time show (much like Norm did on This Old House). In the episode "No, No, Gadot", Tim and Al were arrested for scalping hockey tickets. In a holding cell, an inmate named George approached them and asked if they were "the guys from that TV tool show", and Tim responded with "why, yes, I'm Bob Vila, and this is Norm". Al has a big brother named Cal who is a physicist, and unlike some other siblings around the world, they had never gotten into a physical fight. Instead, they usually settled their disputes over a cup of tea. In a flashback episode of the Tool Time premiere, Al was noted to be a Pisces and had a clean-shaven face, while Tim had a beard. Al has his own fan club. Like Tim, Al is left-handed and his favorite board games are Parcheesi, Chinese Checkers, Scrabble and Bingo. His favorite movie is My Fair Lady. One episode had a pet of Al's, a turtle named "Scooter," which Tim accidentally dropped in cement. With his dry wit, Al serves as the show's (both Tool Time and Home Improvement) straight man to the wackier, more outgoing Tim. Beginning at the end of the fifth season, Al invented a second source of income for himself by inventing a board game based on Tool Time, which features Tim, Al and Heidi as playable characters.

Borland is slightly overweight, and always seen wearing flannel, which Tim cracks jokes about consistently. The reason he always wears flannel came from his father, who, when asking young Al to assist in their own various home projects, would put his old flannels on Al to keep him clean or warm. Al wears flannel as a tribute to him after he died.

Tim also often criticizes Al's mother, Alma Borland, who is never seen (except her hand and forearm), but is apparently severely overweight. In one of the later episodes, Al announces to his mother he is getting married. Immediately afterwards, she screams, passes out, and dies. (she was holding a breadstick, which was all that was seen) When hearing the news, the breadstick shook violently and fell over. The coffin, shown at her funeral, is double-wide to keep the humorous tone.

Al also has a brother, Cal, who looks and dresses almost exactly like him, though he is a physicist ("Sisters and Brothers"). In the episode commentaries featured on the Season 1 DVD Set, the executive producers reveal that "Cal" was a fan from Texas who sent his photo in a fan letter. Upon seeing his resemblance to Al, the producers brought him in to be Al's brother, Cal.

When Al was younger, he took fencing in school and served in the Navy as a Lt (j.g.) with the Seabees, and although he wanted to see the world, he was stationed in Fallon, Nevada (interestingly enough, in the episode where Al mentions this, he uses the shibboleth pronunciation of "Nevada", which is uncommon for an outsider, especially someone living in the midwest). After finishing his military service, Al was a construction crane operator (AFL–CIO Local 324), then apparently got certified as a master plumber and carpenter before getting the job on Tool Time. Al drives a 1983 Mercury Grand Marquis station wagon which his mother passed down to him, and has put much time and effort into preserving the vehicle. While Al has similar interests of Tim such as cars, he has some rather odd interests, such as being able to deduce different types of wood by smell rather than appearance or texture.

Al gets along well with Tim's sons. However, just like Tim, Al has faced problems and needed to seek the advice of Wilson. Outside of his job, Al has made investments such as becoming part owner of Harry's Hardware and marketing a successful board game based on Tool Time, whose object is to avoid hospitalization.[3]

Al's beard is also a constant joke by Tim. In one episode where Tool Time is celebrating their fifth anniversary show, Al is shown in the first ever episode of Tool Time clean shaven, while Tim has a beard.[4]

He generally knows what he is doing more than Tim, and he seems to have a better knowledge of tools and home improvement than Tim. In the first episode of Tool Time, he was described as a "master plumber" by Tim Taylor. He also is very serious about his job, unlike Tim, who often jokes and messes up the project. Al often speaks fondly of his time as a U.S. Navy Seabee. Although Tim is the one who messes up most of the projects on Tool Time, Al is often the one who is blamed for the mishap, or is injured by the mishap. On rare occasions Al would cause a mishap of his own, but these were more due to overcalculating than Tim's attitude of "more power". Despite this, Tim and Al are good friends offstage, and Al often helps out, either by helping with home projects, or by watching his children.

Throughout the series, Al has had four different girlfriends. In season one, Al went out with Greta Post, whom he met while she was volunteering to help out during a Tool Time show. Al then showed an interest in Jill's friend Karen, but when he learned she found another man Al took it well and rebounded. He almost went out with Tim's ex-girlfriend Stacey Lewis, however, he wasn't interested in her as much as he thought. From seasons three through five, Al went out with Dr. Ilene Markham, an orthodontist who is sisters with one of Jill's co-workers. They got engaged, but they decided at the wedding that they shouldn't marry. Al met a woman named Trudy in season seven and married her in the finale episode in 1999.

Wilson W. Wilson, (Earl Hindman) – Tim's neighbor and confidant. As a child, his parents did not allow him to speak to his neighbors, so he really likes talking to Tim and Jill. Wilson serves as an all-wise sage in the show, doling out advice to the Taylor family and seemingly always knowing just what to say to solve a problem. While most of his appearances were to help the Taylors, on seldom occasion someone who was in the extended family, or a nonmember, such as Al, would seek out Wilson's advice. He has traveled the globe and learned much from virtually every culture in existence. He has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, studying "extinct languages and forgotten cultures." His house is full of artifacts along with a pet myna bird named Mozart who appeared infrequently. Wilson was married at one point, but his wife Catherine died long before the series begins (in a November 1994 episode, Wilson revealed that that month would have marked his and Catherine's 25th anniversary).

At first it was unclear whether "Wilson" was his first name or last, but his full name is revealed as Wilson Wilson, Jr. In Season 6, it is revealed that his cousins are the Wilsons of The Beach Boys. He has a grown niece named Willow Wilson (China Kantner), who appeared regularly in the seventh season when she moved in with him for a while. His usual greetings are "Well, hi-dee-hoÂ ..." or "Hi ho, there neighbor" or "good neighbor" when greeting Tim, "neighborette" when greeting Jill, and "Taylor lad(s)" when greeting the Taylor boys.

A visual gag is that Wilson's face isn't shown in its entirety, originally (and most commonly) with the bottom half obscured by the tall privacy fence that separates the neighbors' yards. This gag is extended over the course of the series with other objects (or a beard) obscuring the bottom of his face, or the bottom half showing but the top obscured (such as by a mask), or his full face shown but covered by paint. The audience finally sees Earl Hindman's full face unobscured in the series finale's curtain call. This was based on how Tim Allen saw a next-door neighbor when he was growing up.

Lisa (Pamela Anderson) – Binford's first "Tool Girl." A secondary cast member on Tool Time, Lisa's job was to introduce Tim and Al and to hand them any tool they requested. When Pamela Anderson chose to leave Home Improvement to pursue a role on the syndicated series Baywatch, she was written out of the series after Season 2 and it was stated that Lisa was training to be a paramedic. She returned for a guest appearance four years later, having become fully qualified.

Heidi Keppert (Debbe Dunning) – The second "Tool Girl" (beginning in Season 3) and a master electrician.[5] Initially, the character was seen only in and around the Tool Time set. In later seasons, her personal life crossed paths with Tim and Al on a number of occasions. She gave birth to a daughter (Amy) and suffered marital problems during the show's run. In Season 8 Episode 24 (Dead Weight), Heidi reveals to Tim that her breasts twitch when she is nervous. In the last episode of the series, Heidi revealed she was pregnant for a second time. Her outfits typically showed off her very large cleavage during the "Tool Time" episodes. Tim speculated that many men came to the show just to see Heidi. It is revealed in multiple episodes that Tim's son, Brad, has a crush on her.[5] In seasons seven and eight, her role on Tool Time increased so much that she was eventually given main cast billing in the opening credits.

Harry Turner (Blake Clark) – Owner of "Harry's Hardware", where Tim spent a great deal of his time (and money) and in which Al eventually became part owner. He is married  – not-so-happily  – to Delores (Shirley Prestia), and the couple bad-mouths one another behind their respective backs on every occasion (But Dolores rarely follows this rule). Also has four sons, one Dennis (David DeLuise), with whom he has a somewhat rocky relationship. In one episode Harry told Tim that he had gotten a vasectomy. In another episode it is mentioned he served in the United States Marine Corps in the Vietnam War.

Benny Baroni (Jimmy Labriola) – One of Tim's buddies who hangs out at the hardware store. Benny is a bit of a slacker and notoriously known as a freeloader – his trademark being drinking coffee and eating donuts. Benny has not had a job in years, mainly because he doesn't like to work. He makes money by gambling and betting on horse races. On one episode ("A House Divided", Season 4.18) While the "Tool Time" crew is fixing up Benny's aunt's house, the structure is blown up due to Benny's negligence and is not Tim's fault; furthermore when Tim and his family are moving furniture back into the twice repaired Benny's aunt house, Benny, rather than helping out, lies back on a lawn chair to watch the others do the work. He is also known for being inconsiderate of others; at one point, he even ate at a soup kitchen regularly to avoid paying for meals. One episode ("The Look", Season 5.07) Tim was selling season Pistons tickets (Tim had 2 tickets for each game and each pair cost $100) and Benny not able or willing to buy any of the tickets kept offering to go to the games with the people who were buying them, even people he didn't even know, so he could go to the games without paying for a ticket. Ironically in a rare instance of performing earnest work, Benny once appeared on an episode of Tool Time for "Tim and Al's Fantasy Kitchen", where he was shown cutting meat inside a walk-in freezer.


what does the jewel count on a watch mean

Jewel bearings were invented and introduced in watches by Nicolas Fatio (or Facio) de Duillier and Pierre and Jacob Debaufre around 1702[10][11] to reduce friction. They did not become widely used until the mid 19th century. Until the 20th century they were ground from tiny pieces of natural gems. Watches often had garnet, quartz, or even glass jewels; only top quality watches used sapphire, ruby, or diamond.[10] In 1902, a process to grow artificial sapphire crystals was invented, making jewels much cheaper. Jewels in modern watches are all synthetic sapphire or (usually) ruby, made of corundum (Al2O3), one of the hardest substances known. The only difference between sapphire and ruby is that different impurities have been added to change the color; there is no difference in their properties as a bearing.[12]  The advantage of using jewels is that their ultrahard slick surface has a lower coefficient of friction with metal. The static coefficient of friction of steel-on-steel is 0.58, while that of sapphire-on-steel is 0.10-0.15.[13]

Mechanical watch

A mechanical watch is a watch that uses a mechanism to measure the passage of time, as opposed to modern quartz watches which function electronically. It is driven by a spring (called a mainspring) which must be wound periodically.  Its force is transmitted through a series of gears to power the balance wheel, a weighted wheel which oscillates back and forth at a constant rate.   A device called an escapement releases the watch's wheels to move forward a small amount with each swing of the balance wheel, moving the watch's hands forward at a constant rate.  This makes the 'ticking' sound characteristic of all mechanical watches. Mechanical watches evolved in Europe in the 17th century from spring powered clocks, which appeared in the 15th century.

Mechanical watches are typically not as accurate as modern electronic quartz watches,[1][2][3] and they require periodic cleaning by a skilled watchmaker.[3]  Since the 1970s, quartz watches have taken over most of the watch market, and mechanical watches are now mostly a high-end product, purchased for aesthetic reasons, for appreciation of their fine craftsmanship,[2] or as a status symbol.[2]

The internal mechanism of a watch, excluding the face and hands, is called the movement.  All mechanical watches have these five parts:

Additional functions on a watch besides the basic timekeeping ones are traditionally called complications. Mechanical watches may have these complications:

The mechanical watch is a mature technology, and most ordinary watch movements have the same parts and work the same way.[7]

The mainspring that powers the watch, a spiral ribbon of spring steel, is inside a cylindrical barrel, with the outer end of the mainspring attached to the barrel. The force of the mainspring turns the barrel.  The barrel has gear teeth around the outside that turn the center wheel once per hour â€” this wheel has a shaft that goes through the dial. On the dial side the cannon pinion is attached with a friction fit (allowing it to slide when setting the hands) and the minute hand is attached to the cannon pinion.  The cannon pinion drives a small 12-to-1 reduction gearing called the motion work that turns the hour wheel and hand once for every 12 revolutions of the minute hand.

The center wheel drives the pinion of the third wheel, and the third wheel drives the pinion of the fourth wheel. In watches with the seconds hand in a subsidiary seconds dial, usually located above the 6 o'clock position, the fourth wheel is geared to rotate once per minute, and the second hand is attached directly to the arbour of this wheel.

The fourth wheel also drives the escape wheel of the lever escapement. The escape wheel teeth alternately catch on two fingers called pallets on the arms of the pallet lever, which rocks back and forth. The other end of the lever has a fork which engages with an upright impulse pin on the balance wheel shaft.  Each time the balance wheel swings through its center position, it unlocks the lever, which releases one tooth of the escape wheel, allowing the watch's wheels to advance by a fixed amount, moving the hands forward. As the escape wheel turns, its tooth pushes against the lever, which gives the balance wheel a brief push, keeping it swinging back and forth.

The balance wheel keeps time for the watch. It consists of a weighted wheel which rotates back and forth, which is returned toward its center position by a fine spiral spring, the balance spring or "hair spring".  The wheel and spring together constitute a harmonic oscillator.  The mass of the balance wheel combines with the stiffness of the spring to precisely control the period of each swing or 'beat' of the wheel.  A balance wheel's period of oscillation T in seconds, the time required for one complete cycle (two beats), is

where

I

{\displaystyle I\,}

 is the wheel's moment of inertia in kilogram-meter2  and

κ

{\displaystyle \kappa \,}

 is the stiffness (spring constant) of its balance spring in newton-meters per radian. Most watch balance wheels oscillate at 5, 6, 8, or 10 beats per second. This translates into 2.5, 3, 4, and 5 Hz respectively, or 18000, 21,600, 28,800, and 36,000 beats per hour (BPH). In most watches there is a regulator lever on the balance spring which is used to adjust the rate of the watch. It has two curb pins which embrace the last turn of the spring, and can be slid up or down the spring to control its effective length.  Sliding the pins up the spring, shortening the spring's length, makes it stiffer, increasing

κ

{\displaystyle \kappa \,}

 in the equation above, decreasing the wheel's period

T

{\displaystyle T\,}

 so it swings back and forth faster, causing the watch to run faster.

A separate set of gears called the keyless work winds the mainspring when the crown is rotated, and when the crown is pulled out a short distance allow the hands to be turned to set the watch. The stem attached to the crown has a gear called the clutch or castle wheel, with two rings of teeth that project axially from the ends. When the stem is pushed in, the outer teeth turn the ratchet wheel on top of the mainspring barrel, which turns the shaft that the inner end of the mainspring is attached to, winding the mainspring tighter around the shaft. A spring-loaded pawl or click presses against the ratchet teeth, preventing the mainspring from unwinding. When the stem is pulled out, the inner teeth of the castle wheel engage with a gear which turns the minute wheel.  When the crown is turned, the friction coupling of the cannon pinion allows the hands to be rotated.

If the seconds hand is co-axial with the minute and hour hand, that is it is pivoted at the center of the dial, this arrangement is called "center seconds" or "sweep seconds", because the seconds hand sweeps around the minute track on the dial.

Initially center seconds hands were driven off the third wheel, sometimes via an intermediate wheel, with the gearing on the outside of the top plate. This method of driving the seconds hand is called indirect center seconds. Because the gearing was outside the plates, it added to the thickness of the movement, and because the rotation of the third wheel had to be geared up to turn the seconds hand once a minute, the seconds hand had a fluttering motion.[8]

In 1948 Zenith introduced a watch with a redesigned gear train where the fourth wheel was at the center of the movement, and so could drive a center seconds hand directly. The minute wheel, which had previously been at the center of the movement, was moved off center and drove the minute wheel indirectly. Any fluttering due the indirect gearing is concealed by the relatively slow movement of the minute hand. This redesign brought all the train gearing between the plates and allowed a thinner movement.[9]

Jewels serve two purposes in a watch.[14]  First, reduced friction can increase accuracy. Friction in the wheel train bearings and the escapement causes slight variations in the impulses applied to the balance wheel, causing variations in the rate of timekeeping. The low, predictable friction of jewel surfaces reduces these variations.  Second, they can increase the life of the bearings. In unjeweled bearings, the pivots of the watch's wheels rotate in holes in the plates supporting the movement. The sideways force applied by the driving gear causes more pressure and friction on one side of the hole. In some of the wheels, the rotating shaft can wear away the hole until it is oval shaped, eventually causing the gear to jam, stopping the watch.

In the escapement, jewels are used for the parts that work by sliding friction:[14]

In bearings two different types are used:

in the winding mechanism,
for a total of 25-27

The number of jewels used in watch movements increased over the last 150 years as jeweling grew less expensive and watches grew more accurate.  The only bearings that really need to be jeweled in a watch are the ones in the going train - the gear train that transmits force from the mainspring barrel to the balance wheel - since only they are constantly under force from the  mainspring.[18] The wheels that turn the hands (the motion work) and the calendar wheels are not under load, while the ones that wind the mainspring (the keyless work) are used very seldom, so they do not wear significantly. Friction has the greatest effect in the wheels that move the fastest, so they benefit most from jewelling.  So the first mechanism to be jeweled in watches was the balance wheel pivots, followed by the escapement. As more jeweled bearings were added, they were applied to slower moving wheels, and jewelling progressed up the going train toward the barrel. A 17 jewel watch has every bearing from the balance wheel to the center wheel pivot bearings jeweled, so it was considered a 'fully jeweled' watch.[15] In quality watches, to minimize positional error, capstones were added to the lever and escape wheel bearings, making 21 jewels. Even the mainspring barrel arbor was sometimes jeweled, making the total 23. When self-winding watches were introduced in the 1950s, several wheels in the automatic winding mechanism were jeweled, increasing the count to 25-27.

It is doubtful whether adding jewels in addition to the ones listed above is really useful in a watch.[19] It does not increase accuracy, since the only wheels which have an effect on the balance wheel, those in the going train, are already jeweled.  Marine chronometers, the most accurate portable timepieces, often have only 7 jewels. Nor does jeweling additional wheel bearings increase the useful life of the movement; as mentioned above most of the other wheels do not get enough wear to need them.

However, by the early 20th century watch movements had been standardized to the point that there was little difference between their mechanisms, besides quality of workmanship.  So watch manufacturers made the number of jewels, one of the few metrics differentiating quality watches, a major advertising point, listing it prominently on the watch's face.  Consumers, with little else to go on, learned to equate more jewels with more quality in a watch.  Although initially this was a good measure of quality, it gave manufacturers an incentive to increase the jewel count.

Around the 1960s this 'jewel craze' reached new heights, and manufacturers made watches with 41, 53, 75, or even 100 jewels.[18][19] Most of these additional jewels were totally nonfunctional; they never contacted moving parts, and were included just to increase the jewel count.  For example, the Waltham 100 jewel watch consisted of an ordinary 17 jewel movement, with 83 tiny pieces of ruby mounted around the automatic winding rotor.[20]

In 1974, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in collaboration with the Swiss watch industry standards organization Normes de l'Industrie Horlogère Suisse (NIHS) published a standard, ISO 1112, which prohibited manufacturers from including such nonfunctional jewels in the jewel counts in advertising and sales literature.   This put a stop to the use of totally nonfunctional jewels. However, some experts say manufacturers have continued to inflate the jewel count of their watches by 'upjeweling'; adding functional jeweled bearings to wheels that do not really need them, exploiting loopholes in ISO 1112.[19] Examples given include adding capstones to third and fourth wheel bearings, jeweling minute wheel bearings, and automatic winding ratchet pawls. Arguably none of these additions adds to the accuracy or longevity of the watch.

Some fine mechanical watches will have a world time feature, which is a city bezel as well as an hour bezel which will rotate according to the cities relative time zone.

There are usually 27 cities (corresponding to 24 major time zones) on the city bezel, starting with GMT/UTC:

Peter Henlein has often been described as the inventor of the first pocket watch, the "Nuremberg egg", in 1510, but this claim appears to be a 19th-century invention and does not appear in older sources.[21]

Until the quartz revolution of the 1970s, all watches were mechanical.  Early watches were terribly imprecise; a good one could vary as much as 15 minutes in a day.  Modern precision (a few seconds per day) was not attained by any watch until 1760, when John Harrison created his marine chronometers. Precision was attained as from 1854 first by the Waltham Watch Company,[citation needed] through the industrialisation of the manufacturing process of the movement part, in order to attain the necessary precision: they won a Gold Medal at the 1876  Philadelphia Centennial Exposition with a lot of watches taken at random out of the production line, showing the way to their peers in U.S.A. (e.g. Elgin Watch Company) and the worldwide watch industry.[citation needed]

Mechanical watches are powered by a mainspring.  Modern mechanical watches require of the order of 1  microwatt of power on average.[citation needed]   Because the mainspring provides an uneven source of power (its torque steadily decreases as the spring unwinds), watches from the early 16th century to the early 19th century featured a chain-driven fusee which served to regulate the torque output of the mainspring throughout its winding.  Unfortunately, the fusees were very brittle,[citation needed] were very easy to break,[citation needed] and were the source of many problems, especially inaccuracy of timekeeping when the fusee chain became loose or lost its velocity[citation needed] after the lack of maintenance.

As new kinds of escapements were created which served to better isolate the watch from its time source, the balance spring, watches could be built without a fusee and still be accurate.

In the 18th century the original verge escapement, which required a fusee, was gradually replaced in better French watches with the cylinder escapement, and in British watches with the duplex escapement.  Then in the 19th century both were superseded by the lever escapement which has been used almost exclusively ever since.  A cheaper version of the lever, the pin lever escapement, patented in 1867 by Georges Frederic Roskopf was used in inexpensive watches until the 1970s.

As manual-wound mechanical watches became less popular and less favored in the 1970s, watch design and industrialists came out with the automatic watch. Whereas a mechanically-wound watch must be wound with the pendant or a levered setting, an automatic watch does not need to be wound by the pendant; simply rotating the watch winds the watch automatically. The interior of an automatic watch houses a swiveling metal or brass "plate" that swivels on its axis when the watch is shaken horizontally.[22]


who represents the government in front of the supreme court

The United States Solicitor General is the fourth-highest-ranking official in the U.S. Department of Justice. The United States Solicitor General is the person appointed to represent the federal government of the United States before the Supreme Court of the United States. The current Solicitor General, Noel Francisco, took office on September 19, 2017.[1] The Solicitor General determines the legal position that the United States will take in the Supreme Court. In addition to supervising and conducting cases in which the government is a party, the office of the Solicitor General also files amicus curiae briefs in cases in which the federal government has a significant interest in the legal issue. The office of the Solicitor General argues on behalf of the government in virtually every case in which the United States is a party, and also argues in most of the cases in which the government has filed an amicus brief. In the federal courts of appeal, the Office of the Solicitor General reviews cases decided against the United States and determines whether the government will seek review in the Supreme Court. The Office of the Solicitor General also reviews cases decided against the United States in the federal district courts and approves every case in which the government files an appeal.

Solicitor General of the United States

The Solicitor General is assisted by four Deputy Solicitors General and seventeen Assistants to the Solicitor General. Three of the deputies are career attorneys in the Department of Justice. The remaining deputy is known as the "Principal Deputy," sometimes called the "political deputy" and, like the Solicitor General, typically leaves at the end of an administration. The current Principal Deputy is Jeffrey B. Wall, who succeeded Noel J. Francisco after Francisco was nominated to be Solicitor General in March 2017. The other deputies currently are Michael Dreeben, Edwin Kneedler, and Malcolm Stewart.

The Solicitor General or one of the deputies typically argues the most important cases in the Supreme Court. Cases not argued by the Solicitor General may be argued by one of the assistants or another government attorney. The Solicitors General tend to argue 6–9 cases per Supreme Court term, while deputies argue 4–5 cases and assistants each argue 2–3 cases.[2]

The Solicitor General, who has offices in the Supreme Court Building as well as the Department of Justice Headquarters, has been called the "tenth justice"[3] as a result of the close relationship between the justices and the Solicitor General (and their respective staffs of clerks and deputies). As the most frequent advocate before the Court, the Office of the Solicitor General generally argues dozens of times each term. As a result, the Solicitor General tends to remain particularly comfortable during oral arguments that other advocates would find intimidating. Furthermore, when the office of the Solicitor General endorses a petition for certiorari, review is frequently granted, which is remarkable given that only 75â€“125 of the over 7,500 petitions submitted each term are granted review by the Court.[4]

Other than the justices themselves, the Solicitor General is among the most influential and knowledgeable members of the legal community with regard to Supreme Court litigation. Six Solicitors General have later served on the Supreme Court: William Howard Taft (who served as the 27th President of the United States before becoming Chief Justice of the United States), Stanley Forman Reed, Robert H. Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, and Elena Kagan. Some who have had other positions in the office of the Solicitor General have also later been appointed to the Supreme Court. For example, Chief Justice John Roberts was the Principal Deputy Solicitor General during the George H. W. Bush administration and Associate Justice Samuel Alito was an Assistant to the Solicitor General. The last former Solicitor General to be successfully nominated to the court was Justice Elena Kagan. [5] Only one former Solicitor General has been nominated to the Supreme Court unsuccessfully, that being Robert Bork; however, no sitting Solicitor General has ever been denied such an appointment. Eight other Solicitors General have served on the United States Courts of Appeals.

Within the Justice Department, the Solicitor General exerts significant influence on all appeals brought by the department. The Solicitor General is the only U.S. officer that is statutorily required to be "learned in law."[6] Whenever the DOJ wins at the trial stage and the losing party appeals, the concerned division of the DOJ responds automatically and proceeds to defend the ruling in the appellate process. However, if the DOJ is the losing party at the trial stage, an appeal can only be brought with the permission of the Solicitor General. For example, should the tort division lose a jury trial in federal district court, that ruling cannot be appealed by the Appellate Office without the approval of the Solicitor General.

When determining whether to grant certiorari in a case where the federal government is not a party, the Court will sometimes request the Solicitor General to weigh in, a procedure referred to as a "Call for the Views of the Solicitor General" (CVSG).[7] In response to a CVSG, the Solicitor General will file a brief opining on whether the petition should be granted and, usually, which party should prevail.[8]

Although the CVSG is technically an invitation, the Solicitor General's office treats it as tantamount to a command.[8] Philip Elman, who served as an attorney in the Solicitor General's office and who was primary author of the federal government's brief in Brown v. Board of Education, wrote, "When the Supreme Court invites you, that's the equivalent of a royal command. An invitation from the Supreme Court just can't be rejected."[9][10]

The Court typically issues a CVSG where the justices believe that the petition is important, and may be considering granting it, but would like a legal opinion before making that decision.[9] Examples include where there is a federal interest involved in the case; where there is a new issue for which there is no established precedent; or where an issue has evolved, perhaps becoming more complex or affecting other issues.[9]

Although there is no deadline by which the Solicitor General is required to respond to a CVSG, briefs in response to the CVSG are generally filed at three times of the year: late May, allowing the petition to be considered before the Court breaks for summer recess; August, allowing the petition to go on the "summer list", to be considered at the end of recess; and December, allowing the case to be argued in the remainder of the current Supreme Court term.[8]

Several traditions have developed since the Office of Solicitor General was established in 1870. Most obviously to spectators at oral argument before the Court, the Solicitor General and his or her deputies traditionally appear in formal morning coats,[11] although Elena Kagan, the only woman to hold the office, elected to forgo the practice.[12]

During oral argument, the members of the Court often address the Solicitor General as "General."[13][14]

Another tradition, possibly unique to the United States, is the practice of confession of error. If the government prevailed in the lower court but the Solicitor General disagrees with the result, he or she may confess error, after which the Supreme Court will vacate the lower court's ruling and send the case back for reconsideration.[15]


how many times did joe davis won the world championship

Joseph Davis, OBE (15 April 1901 â€“ 10 July 1978) was an English professional snooker and English billiards player.[2] He was the dominant figure in snooker from the 1920s to the 1950s. He won the first 15 World Championships from 1927 to 1946.

Joe Davis

After his 1946 victory he no longer played in the World Championship but continued to play in other tournaments and exhibition matches until the late 1950s. He was World Billiards Champion 4 times between 1928 and 1932.

Joe Davis became a professional billiards player at the age of 18, having won the Chesterfield Championship at age 13. In 1926 he reached his first World Professional Billiards Championship final but was unsuccessful against defending champion Tom Newman.  He reached the final again the following year and was runner-up again to the same opponent.  It was to be a case of third time lucky for Davis when he defeated Newman in 1928 to become the world champion at English billiards for the first time. He would defend his title for the next three years â€“ against Newman again in 1929 and 1930 and New Zealander Clark McConachy in 1932.  He contested the final two more times in 1933 and 1934 losing on both occasions to Australian Walter Lindrum.

Coinciding with his peak as a billiards player, Davis's interests shifted to snooker and he helped to organise the first snooker world championship in 1927 and won the tournament by beating Tom Dennis, for which he won UK£6 10s.[3] He went on to win the world championship every year until 1940. Joe's brother Fred, twelve years his junior, was also a snooker player and multiple World Champion. When Joe met Fred in the world championship final of 1940, Joe won 37–36.

Following the outbreak of World War II the world championship was not held for the next five years.  On resumption in 1946, Davis defended his title making it his 15th consecutive win and thereby holding the title for 20 straight years. To date, he has won more world championships than any other player.[3] He retired from the event following this victory making him the only undefeated player in the history of the world championships.

Davis proved he was still the man to beat up to the 1950s by winning the News of the World Tournament on three occasions during the decade.  His nearest rivals were his brother, Fred, and future world champion John Pulman who each both won it on two occasions.  He made history in 1955 by achieving the first officially recognised maximum break of 147 in snooker in an exhibition match at Leicester Square Hall. He had previously made the game's first official century break in 1930. In 1959 Davis attempted to popularise a new version of the game called snooker plus. This game had two extra colours, an orange and a purple and was used for the 1959 News of the World Snooker Plus Tournament but it never took off.
In 1962, when over 60 years of age, he made the first televised century break. This break of exactly 100 was his first visit to the table in the very first frame of a match against the sitting World Champion John Pulman and consisted of seven blacks, two pinks and five blues. The break came to an end when Davis missed a long red into the top right hand pocket, the only time during the break when he was faced with a difficult pot, such was the quality of his positional play. [4]

Davis was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1963.  He continued to play professionally until 1964.

Davis died two months after collapsing while watching his brother play Perrie Mans in the 1978 World Snooker Championship semi-final. His home, in Whitwell, Derbyshire bears a plaque commemorating him.

With 15 World Snooker titles spanning an unbeaten 20-year period as World Champion and an entire career which contained only 4 defeats off level terms, all of which came in later life and all of which were inflicted by his own brother who was himself a multiple World Champion, it is difficult not to name him as one of the greatest players of all time. Ronnie O'Sullivan named him third greatest player, behind Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry. [5] Indeed, until the 1980s, he was still generally regarded as the best, with even the next generation acknowledging the sentiment, as demonstrated by the famous snooker coach Frank Callan who in his book "Frank Callan's Snooker Clinic" published in the 1980s, compared the current best, Steve Davis, to Joe Davis in order to determine the greatest player ever. Neither Fred Davis, John Pulman nor Ray Reardon were mentioned. Callan also states that "many players who tried to emulate Joe's stance (which was unusually off centre due to left eye striking) simply gave up the game when they found they couldn't play like that". Such was the influence of Joe Davis. In Callan's own words; "His word was law".
When taking into consideration the playing conditions of Joe Davis's time, it would perhaps be reasonable to assume that had he played in the modern era, with much faster cloths and the benefit of growing up in an era where from an early age a novice player has access to instructional tools such as books, video and more experienced players around him, he would have been an even better player. Joe Davis had to learn the game himself, in an era where Snooker was a game played for fun by Billiards Players, not a serious game. [6] He wrote the instructional book "How I Play Snooker" which Steve Davis and his father Bill used as the basis for building the Six times World Champions technique back in the 1970s. Perhaps the best example of the legacy of Joe Davis is the shadow he still casts to this day over the modern legends of the game. Steve Davis, who holds the record for most Professional Tournament Wins and himself is generally regarded as the beginning of the modern game, has stated that if he could play against a player from the past, it would be Joe Davis, to "find out how good he really was". [7]


when does a funnel cloud become a tornado

If a funnel cloud touches the ground it becomes a tornado. Most tornadoes begin as funnel clouds, but many funnel clouds do not make ground contact and so do not become tornadoes. Also, a tornado does not necessarily need to have an associated condensation funnelâ€”if strong cyclonic winds are occurring at the surface (and connected to a cloud base, regardless of condensation), then the feature is a tornado. Some tornadoes may appear only as a debris swirl, with no obvious funnel cloud extending below the rotating cloud base.

Funnel cloud

A funnel cloud is a funnel-shaped cloud of condensed water droplets, associated with a rotating column of wind and extending from the base of a cloud (usually a cumulonimbus or towering cumulus cloud) but not reaching the ground or a water surface. A funnel cloud is usually visible as a cone-shaped or needle like protuberance from the main cloud base. Funnel clouds form most frequently in association with supercell thunderstorms.

In cloud nomenclature, any funnel- or inverted-funnel-shaped cloud depending from cumulus or cumulonimbus clouds is technically described as an accessory feature called tuba. The terms tuba and funnel cloud are nearly but not exactly synonymous; a wall cloud, for example, is also a form of tuba.

Cold-air funnel clouds (vortices) are usually short-lived and generally much weaker than the vortices produced by supercells. Although cold-air funnels rarely make ground contact, they may touch down briefly and become weak tornadoes or waterspouts.

Unlike the related phenomenon associated with severe thunderstorms, cold-air funnels are generally associated with partly cloudy skies in the wake of cold fronts, where atmospheric instability and moisture is sufficient to support towering cumulus clouds but not precipitation. The mixing of cooler air in the lower troposphere with air flowing in a different direction in the middle troposphere causes the rotation on a horizontal axis, which, when deflected vertically by atmospheric conditions, can become a funnel cloud.[1]

They are a common sight along the Pacific Coast of the United States, particularly in the spring or fall.[1]

On July 29, 2013, a cold-core funnel cloud touched down as an EF0 tornado in Ottawa, Canada, causing extensive damage in the form of downed trees on a golf course. No advance weather watches or warnings were issued by Environment Canada, and the tornado was spawned from one of the few non-severe storm clouds moving through the area.[2][3]


who does dell end up with in private practice

Dell married Heather, and most of the group at the Practice did not approve of it. He later yelled at Violet and Naomi due to their opposition of his marriage.

Dell Parker

William Parker, more commonly known as Dell Parker, is a character on the Grey's Anatomy spin-off, Private Practice.[1] He was portrayed by actor Chris Lowell and appeared from the first through third seasons. Dell was the receptionist at the Oceanside Wellness Group as well as a qualified nurse, training to be a mid-wife, helping out the doctors with various tasks. Dell was frequently shown to be concerned with the health of younger patients, which is likely related to his abuse as a child, as well as his own young daughter. The character died following injuries sustained in a car crash.[2]

Dell was abused as a child, which allows him to relate to patients of the practice who have similar experiences. In the first season, Dell falls in love with Naomi Bennett, his boss, despite the fact she later becomes involved with Sam Bennett, her former husband. In the season one finale, Dell finally expresses his feelings and tries to kiss Naomi.[3]

In the season two premiere, Dell tries to help Naomi hide the practice's budding financial struggles, under the pretenses of "going green," but does so without her knowledge.[4] However, believing he wants to talk to her regarding his crush on her, Naomi continually ignores his pleas to discuss the matter, forcing Dell to concede and quit his job.

After leaving his job at the Oceanside Wellness Group, Dell works as a nurse at St. Ambrose Hospital.[5] Upon learning this, Naomi tries to convince Dell to return to the practice without much luck. After a pep talk from Addison, Dell wishes to return to the practice as long as a list of demands are met, one of which states that he is to be exempt from wearing pink scrubs. Sam, the head of the practice at the time, refuses to rehire him. This forces Naomi to fight for his reinstatement to which Sam finally agrees.

Dell later ends up arguing with Addison, who has since become the head of the practice, over whether or not he should have his own office; but he eventually ends up setting one aside for himself without permission. However, Addison does not punish him and allows him to keep the office when it is revealed that he has a six-year-old daughter, Betsy, from an unsuccessful relationship with Heather when he was seventeen; and he was just trying to impress his daughter.

Dell enrolled as a student in the South Bay School of Holistic Midwifery and Family Nursing. He earned credit towards his degree in midwifery by assisting staff doctors with obstetrical exams and childbirths. Dell's hobbies included surfing during his lunch breaks.

When Heather gets a promotion at work, she talks to Dell, informing him the promotion is in St. Louis. Dell does not want this to happen, and they fight about it. Later on, when Dell goes to talk to her, he finds her apartment empty, and Betsy gone.

One night when Dell was heading out for work, his home exploded. Betsy escapes with minor injuries, but Heather received third degree burns on her body. Later on, the explosion was revealed to have been caused by Heather cooking crystal meth on the stove. After this revelation, Dell was furious and told Heather to go die and suffer a miserable death for putting their daughter in danger, then proceeded to not allow Betsy see her mother. Later in the hospital that night, Heather died due to her injuries, never having the chance to say good-bye to Dell or Betsy.

Dell later befriended Naomi and Sam's daughter Maya, who had gotten pregnant and didn't have her mother's support. Dell supported Maya when she decided to marry Dink, the father of her baby, and later helped them out during her pregnancy. When Maya goes into labor, she calls Dell who picks her up and drives her to the hospital. They are involved in a car crash and Maya is in a critical state, as well as her baby. With everything going on with Maya and the baby, nobody checks on Dell, who suddenly passes out and is revealed to have an initially undetected brain hemorrhage. Naomi will not let Amelia out of Maya's spinal surgery to fix Dell, and Charlotte and Amelia eventually operate on him, but during surgery he goes into cardiac arrest and Charlotte and Amelia were not able to resuscitate him on the table.[6]


who played cambridge in pie in the sky

Bella Enahoro is a British Nigerian actress who is famous for her co-starring role in Pie in the Sky as WPC/DS Sophia Cambridge.

Bella Enahoro

She was born Annabella, the only daughter of the late anti-colonial journalist and later politician, Chief Anthony Enahoro and his wife, Helen (nÃ©e Ediae). She is of Esan & Bini descent, originating from Edo State, Nigeria.

Her career started in 1987 when she was in the film Aria. In 1990, Enahoro appeared in one episode of the TV series Making News, in the film Mister Johnson as Bamu and in the Ruth Rendell Mysteries' episode "Some Lie and Some Die" she played Joan Miall.

In her first starring role Enahoro played Cambridge in Pie in the Sky from 1994-1996. She did not return to acting until 1998, when she played a small role in Kings of Chaos. She played Madame Rosa in the 1999 Secret Laughter of Women. In 2000, Enahoro played Zita Sallinger in Trial & Retribution. Her most recent television role was in a 2002 episode of the anthology series, Murder in Mind, as Dr. Anne Redford in "Memories".

In 2010 Enahoro founded a London-based company specialising in motivational training, self-help and personal growth.


who wrote the song black is the colour

"Black Is the Color (of My True Love's Hair)" (Roud 3103) is a traditional folk song first known in the US in the Appalachian Mountains but  originating from Scotland, as attributed to the reference to the Clyde in the song's lyrics. The musicologist Alan Lomax supported this Scottish origin, saying that the song was an American "re-make of British materials."[1]

Many different versions of this song exist, some addressed to females and others addressed to males, as well as other differences:

These words are set to two distinct melodies, one of which is traditional and the other was written by the Kentucky folk singer and composer John Jacob Niles. Niles recalled that his father thought the traditional melody was "downright terrible", so he wrote "a new tune, ending it in a nice modal manner." This melody was used in the Folk Songs song cycle by Luciano Berio.[2]

The song has become a part of the traditional repertory of Celtic music artists. The song was collected as "Black is the color" by Cecil Sharp & Maud Karpeles in 1916 from Mrs Lizzie Roberts. It appeared in Sharps English Folksongs From The Southern Appalachians (1932).[3] In the 1960s, Patty Waters sang an extended version for an ESP record which veered towards the avant garde and extremes of vocal improvisation,[4][unreliable source?] standing as a landmark in the use of folk tunes as a starting point to other musical areas.[citation needed]

Versions of the song have been recorded by many artists, including:

"Black Is the Color" is featured in The Twilight Zone season 3 episode entitled "The Passerby", which aired on October 6, 1961.

"Black Is The Color" is featured in the 1962 pilot for the western TV series Gallaway House, starring Johnny Cash, Merle Travis, Karen Downs and Eddie Dean.

"Black is the Color" is featured in The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. A sailor sings it to Heather as she and her new husband, Brandon Birmingham, pass by on the way to an inn before leaving London.

The "Lover's Lament" / "Love's Jewels" lyrics sung in Anne Bishop's Tir Alainn book series are loosely based on this song.

A cover of the song by Jim Moray featured on the Class season 1 finale "The Lost", appearing in both the post credit opening and closing fight sequence.