La Mort du duc de Guise

Alhambra Theatre , London

‘At a “private exhibition” yesterday afternoon, Messers. Pathe Freres, in conjunction with the management, showed on the cinematograph  three wordless plays from Paris.’

‘On the cinematograph we saw not only the murder …but glimpses of the life of cafes , grand and humble …and all sorts of thrilling things, including a  danse d’Apache by Mlle. Mistenguette and a man.’

‘All these, of course,  not in the flesh, but on the films , while the orchestra played….next came a version of  L’Arlesienne… and finally the Murder of the Duke of Guise, a play specially composed for  this kind of performance , by M. Lavenden, and acted by no lesser people than M. le Bargey, M. Albert Lambert, and Mlle. Gabrielle Robbinne.’  The Times, Saturday, Nov 21, 1908; pg. 13; Issue 38810; col

Camille Saint-Saens wrote in 1908 the first modern film score for the cinema, for the silent film Murder of the Duke of Guise [sometimes refered to as  L'Assassinat du duc de Guise].    The film only ran for about 18 minutes, but has become of great historical importance in the development of silent films, film scores, and sound of  the ‘talkies’.  Silent films were still popular in France up to the 1930s.

It is interesting to note that as the film achieved critical acclaim, going some way of launching the fledgeling film industry into popular culture, Saint-Saëns did not himself seek the notariety associated with later film-stars and film score composers.   Saint-Saëns wrote to the German journalist M. Levin in 1901  “I take very little notice of either praise or censure, not because I have an exalted idea of my own merits (which would be foolish), but because in doing my work, and fulfilling the function of my nature, as an apple-tree grows apples, I have no need to trouble myself with other people’s views.”

The Union of Film Music Composers [UFMC] is celebrating the centenary of film music, in association with the Federation of Film and Audiovisual Composers of Europe [FFACE].  UFMC writes that   ‘Le film marque un tournant dans l’histoire du cinéma en édifiant d’une première pierre l’histoire de la musique originale : la composition de Saint-Saëns suit très précisément chaque scène, n’autorisant au chef aucune désynchronisation avec l’image. D’autres extraits de musiques de films ainsi qu’une masterclass suivront la projection.’

 If you would like to lean more about Saint-Saëns and early film music, please see the links below….

Musical memories by Camille Saint-Saëns

French cinema : from its beginnings to the present by Rémi Fournier Lanzoni  shelved on L evel 2 at 791.430944/LAN

The sounds of early cinema /edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman  shelved on Level 2 at 791.4309/SOU

Spellbound in darkness :a history of the silent film by George C. Pratt shelved on Level 2 at 791.4309/PRA

The ciné goes to town :French cinema, 1896-1914 /Richard Abel shelved on Level 2 at 791.430944/ABE

Musicians of To-Day, by Romain Rolland [1915]

Film and Sound Online - a set of collections of film and video. Login via UK Federation, choose Loughborough University (ATHENS) from the drop-down list then login with your Athens username and password.   Available via MetaLib.

Sea of Tranquillity

 

 Apollo 40th Anniversary

 

 ‘Apollo 11 makes its thunderous, fiery exit at tea time on July 16th with its three man crew: Mr. Neil Armstrong, a civilian who is destined to be the first on the moon, Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Aldrin, who will walk the surface with him, and Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Collins who will stay in the orbiting command module………Perhaps the greatest prize awaited from the journey is the 50lb. of lunar rock and soil the astronauts are expected to gather ……… ‘The Times Tuesday, Jun 03, 1969; pg. III; Issue 57576; col A

The lunar rock samples brought by the Apollo missions show us that the moon contains familiar material such as iron, aluminium, potassium, magnesium, feldspar, basalt, ranging in form from fine dust to rugged rocks and boulders.  

Samples were distributed to a selection of  scientific institutions throughout the world,  and lunar rock samples went on public display at the Museum and Institute of Geological Sciences, London, in September 1969 [Edinburgh University's sample is said to have 'arrived in a tiny phial wrapped in a pair of pyjamas .... Five grams of  greyish brown dust ... estimated to be worth more than £1m.'   The Times Saturday, Sep 20, 1969; pg. 1; Issue 57670; col A]

Loughborough University subscribes to over 40 aeronautical and astronolical journals online, such as Acta astronautica,  Astronomy & geophysics,  Astrophysics and Space Science  and Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy , all of which can be accessed via MetaLib.   [ATHENS username and password required for off campus access]

Image collections are available also in MetaLib, giving a wide range of pictures of the moon, footage from  NASA space missions, interviews with former astronauts, audio tracks of the moon landings, – for audio visual material you can use  Newsfilm online  [ some 3,000 hours of footage; c. 60,000 stories] and  BBC Motion Gallery [which contains over 30,000 clips are available, spanning 70 years].   [ATHENS username and password required for access].

If you would like to learn more about the Apollo missions, please see the links below.

Google Moon

Film of Apollo 11

Audio Apollo 11 landing

NASA – Celebrating the ‘giant leap’

Department of Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University.

Department of Geography at Loughborough University

Cricket at Loughborough

 

 

‘On Wednesday an interesting game was played in Mr Tyler’s meadow, near the railway, between eleven of the Loughborough’s Gentlemen’s Club, and the Borough-hill Club.   At the close of the game, which was played first-rate, the number of runs stood as follows:  Loughborough 192, Borough Hill 92, majority, 100.‘  The Era (London, England), Sunday, August 13, 1843; Issue 255

Loughborough has a long cricket history.  Tyler’s meadow is believed to be a ground  near Allsops Lane, where Loughborough played an annual match against the All England Eleven and the United England Eleven from 1856 – 1871.

Loughborough has had, over time, up to 12 cricket grounds, such as the Park Road ground which was first used in 1913, and the College Ground, where Leicestershire came to play Galmorgan in 1929.  The first ever County Cricket match between Leicester and Nottingham was played in Loughborough in 1781, although the location of this early pitch is unknown.

Loughborough University Library has over 200 books on cricket, ranging from historic works such as W.G. Grace’s Cricket, published in 1891 and housed in the Special Collections alongside books on cricket by Douglas Jardine, C.B. Fry, Walter Hammond, Pelham Warner, Neville Cardus and Donald Bradman,  to modern coaching and training manuals.

You can also  find out more about cricket via sports databases available on through MetaLib, such as SPORTDiscus which can be searched for full-text articles on physical fitness, exercise, sports medicine, sports science, physical education, kinesiology, coaching, training etc.

If you would like to find out more about modern cricket at Loughborough, please see the links below.

Loughborough UCCE (University Cricket Centre of Excellence)

National Cricket Performance Centre

Loughborough School of Sport and Exercise Sciences

Loughborough School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Loughborough Outwoods Cricket Club

Loughborough Greenfields Cricket Club 

Loughborough Carillon Cricket Club

Loughborough Town Cricket Club

BBC to launch political webcasting service

The indetail09 industrial design degree show 2009

 

June 12th – 19th 2009

The indetail09 industrial design degree show is a collection of undergraduate work from Loughborough University’s Design and Technology department.

This year’s event will be held at the Sir Denis Rooke Building in Holywell Park, Loughborough and will showcase over 100 student projects.

Admission is free and there is no need to book in advance.

We look forward to meeting you!

Opening Times

Friday       12th June        12pm – 5pm
Saturday  13th June        10am – 5pm
Sunday     14th June       10am – 5pm
Monday   15th June       10am – 5pm
Tuesday   16th June      10am – 12pm

The indetail09 industrial design degree show

Rock’s Backpages

 

 Loughborough University Library now subscribes to the new database Rock’s Backpages.

Rock’s Backpages is an online database of rock music writing, with material dating from the late 1950’s to the present day.

The library of articles includes reviews, interviews and features, which are fully searchable and presented in full-text.

The database also includes Mp3 audio files of original artist interviews, which are available for the first time.

There are now over fourteen thousand articles on the site, featuring over two thousand artists with up to fifty new articles added each week.

You can access the database from on-campus via MetaLib

For off-campus access please login to the Library pages via the Remote Working Portal .

Loughborough University Department of Social Sciences.

Loughborough University Department of Politics, International Relations and European Studies

 

BBC to launch political webcasting service : Democracy Live

Motorway sign on M6 7/7/2005. Copyright David Wulff www.flickr.com

The above photograph was taken on July 7th 2005, the day when the London tube bombings took place. On this date the BBC received a thousand stills and videos, 3,000 texts and 20,000 e-mails. According to the director of BBC News, Helen Boaden, this was the day that news gathering in Britain changed forever – ‘it introduced citizen journalism on an unprecedented scale fuelled by the use of mobile camera and video phones’.

In response to the growth in this new kind of  journalism the BBC is to launch a political webcasting platform in the autumn known as ‘Democracy Live’ . The site will offer ‘live and on-demand video from all the main UK institutions and the European Parliament’. Users will be able to search the site for video footage of officials and the topics that are of interest to them.

They will be then be able to follow the contributions of elected representatives in the various parliaments and find out more about their backgrounds.

As well as providing an important resource for current affairs, the site will also include information on the workings of the institutions of the UK government and their powers .

The aim is to make ‘Democracy Live’ a resource that is to be shared with its users who will be able download video and text content and place it on their own blogs and sites.

 

 

The beginnings of British aeronautics; 1909 – 2009

On the 19th June 1909 the magazine Flight published the official rules concerning the £1,000 Daily Mail Flight Prize. 

Rule 1: ‘The flight shall be accomplished by means of a machine which is not in any manner supported by a gas lighter than air’ 

Rule 4:  ‘The distance to be travelled will not be less than 1 mile on a course round a mark half a mile distant from a prescribed starting line….’

Rule 11: ‘Each competetor agrees to waive all claims for injury either to himself or his apparatus…’

The Wright brothers had demonstrated to the World  sustained powered flight in December 1903 using the Wright Flyer , and in 1907 British aviator and ‘famous aeroplanist’  Henri Farman  won  the Archdeacon Cup for flying over 3,000 feet over 492 feet.   A year later in 1908 , in England, the Aero Club held an exhibiton of model flying machines at Olympia, and the Wright brothers showed their plane in France,  which attracted enormous interest.

Flying caught the public imagination. Both Bleriot [the first man to fly across the English Channel in July 1909] and Farman later appeared in newspaper and magazine phamaceutical adverts for products such as ‘Phosferine; the greatest of all tonics…and the remedy of kings’ .  The adverts quote Bleriot as saying…

  ‘For anyone, no matter what capacity, I can with confidence, recommend Phosferine as a bracing nerve tonic and preventative against fatigue and a resorative for loss of vitality..’

Several successful short flights in 1909 helped  British flying to gather momentum.  In March 1909 the English aviator Lord Moore- Brabazon flew three miles at Chalons Camp in France at a height of fifteen to twenty feet, using an eight cylinder motor in his plane and it was Moore-Brabazon who won the £1,000 Daily Mail Flight Prize, flying a British built Short No 2 biplane,  in the Isle of Sheppey. Moore-Brabazon later flew the first live freight aircraft, by strapping a large basket to the wing of the aircraft, containing a small pig [named Icarus ll], before flying off.

The success of aviation in the UK sporned several local competitions, such as aeroplane point-to-point races, competitions for the longest distance of flights, longest duration of flights, carrying an aviator alone, carrying a pilot and passenger, flying a closed circuit of an aerodrome or flying in a straight line.  As an expensive sport for wealthy gentlemen [and ladies such Ireland's first aviatrix Lilian E. Bland and France's  Baroness Raymonde de la Roche] pilots were also invited to join the Hurlingham Club which  had held a ‘hare and hounds’ balloon race in July 1909. 

For more information on the history of British aviation you may like to visit these resouces.

Aviation on Sheppey

Sky Sheppey 2009

Flight Magazine Archives

Daily Mirror Archive

The Times Digital Archive

Pioneer  aviation picture gallery

Departmenf of  Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering at Loughborough University

 

Obituaries on Wikipedia

Copyright: Sabrina's Stash www.flickr.com

 

Following the mistaken publication of a premature obituary in the New York Journal, Mark Twain cabled his publishers to tell them that “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” (June 2 1897)

Now that Wikipedia has issued two such obituaries, the user-generated site is to review the regulations governing contributions.

This is after pages on Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd had been edited incorrectly to state that they had both died. Senator Kennedy has a malignant brain tumour and collapsed during an inaugural lunch for President Obama on 20 January and was later reported to be recovering in hospital. His entry on the site read that “Kennedy suffered a seizure at a luncheon following the Barack Obama presidential inauguration on 20 January 2009. He was removed in a wheelchair and died shortly after”. A similar mistake was made on the entry for Senator Byrd.

Both errors were corrected in a very short time but now Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales wants a new users’ changes to be vetted by an editor. At present very few topics are subject to this process – the most famous example being the Israel / Palestine conflict which is subject to continuous review.  Extending the editing process is opposed by some contributors who claim that such a process would lead to backlogs and the loss of the site’s reputation for speed. Mr Wales says that 60 per cent of his users are in favour of the scheme however he is  faced with a barrage of protest from other Wikipedia editors.

One said “Our future depends on those ignorant of Wikipedia’s potential stumbling on an article, fixing it and getting hooked. Flagged revisions throw a wrench into that process”. Jimmy Wales has asked the opposition to make “an alternative proposal with seven days, to be voted upon fourteen days after that.”

This is not the first time that Wikipedia has issued incorrect information about the passing of public figures.When the disgraced Enron chief Kenneth Lay died suddenly in 2006,  the news agency, Reuters decided to monitor the way his death was described on the website. Lay’s death, six weeks after his fraud conviction, was variously attributed to an apparent suicide at 10.06am, two minutes later it was a “heart attack or suicide”, at 10.11am “the guilt of ruining so many lives finaly (sic) led him to suicide” and then a few minutes after that, “a doctor” stated that the stress of the trial had probably led to his death.  Getting information right would lead to delays in publication of entries however since Wikipedia claims to be a reference work not a news network, this should not be seen as a problem.

 

The Gr8 Deb8

Copyright: Crickee www.flickr.com

The Library has recently acquired David Crystal’s new book on the phenomenon of texting ‘Txting: the Gr8 Deb8′

A lot of opinion makers think that texting is ruining the English language, the BBC Radio 4 presenter John Humphreys has argued that those who text are “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped”

Crystal argues that since the invention of printing – said to be an instrument of the devil because it filled people’s minds with false notions – pundits have been scaremongering about the consequences new technology will have on language. Texting has caused the most controversy. A lot of stories in the press have given the impression that young people write in abbreviations all the time. In 2003 a teenager was supposed to have written an essay entirely in text which her teacher could not decipher. Parts of it appeared on the Internet and it was used in many tabloid articles on texting but since no one was ever able to find a source for the whole essay, it was decided that it was likely to be a hoax.

A number of researchers have produced reports on text messaging from many points of view – sociological, psychological and linguistic. The evidence shows that the ability to write well is not adversely affected by the texting habit.

Texters like to break grammatical rules, use phonetic spellings (wot instead of what) and abbreviations but they know that they must be understood so are careful not to use forms that will render their messages incomprehensible. An American study found that only 20% of messages studied included abbreviations and a Norwegian study found there were even fewer – 6%.

There are elements of text messages which are thought to be innovatory but in fact date back a hundred years or more. One of the most obvious is the use of single letters, numbers and symbols to stand for words or parts of words e.g. c for “see” and 4 instead of “for”.  These are known as rebuses; in the

Oxford English Dictionary the first recorded use of the word was in 1605. A favourite pastime in the 1700s was to write rebus letters in which people drew as many symbols to represent parts of words as they could think of.

The use of abbreviations has existed since phonetic script came into being and, paradoxically, increased with the growth of literacy between the 15th and 17th centuries. Children of military men often talk of how their fathers used to speak almost entirely in abbreviations when talking to the colleagues – AWOL (absent without leave, 2IC  (second in command)and NTR (Nothing to report).

The linguistic innovation in texting is to conflate rebuses and abbreviations as in LtsGt2gthr (lets get together) and T+ (think positive).   Texters use  letters, symbols and words without any spaces, a practice which was unknown before in the use of alternative writing systems.

Crystal says that many texts are linguistically complex and  that texting enables people to have fun with language.

In 2007  T-Mobile set up a competition to find the first “Txt laureate”  and offered a prize for the best romantic text poem.

The runner up, Eileen Bridge, a 68 year old grandmother from Accrington dedicated her poem to her husband: “O hart tht sorz, My luv adorz, He mAks meliv, He mAks me giv, Myslf 2 him,  As my love porz”.

Five years of research is underway hoping  to contradict the belief that texting stops children learning to read and write.  Beverley Plester and Clare Wood of Coventry University undertook some research to find if the habit of texting adversely affected children’s literacy. They tested thirty five eleven year olds and found that the children who were the best at using textisms were also found to be better writers and spellers.