Columbus' arrival in the Americas

Columbus celebrations commemorate the Genoese explorer's first expedition across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Columbus, on commission by the Spanish monarchy, was hoping to find a new naval route to India and the other nations of the East, but instead found the American continent which was virtually unknown to Europeans at the time. Columbus's sailor Rodrigo de Triana was the first on the voyage to spot land in the New World; he found the island the natives called Guanahani at approximately 2:00 AM on October 12, 1492. The exact location of this island is unknown, though it was somewhere in the Bahamas. Columbus's expedition launched the first large-scale European colonization of the Americas.

United States observance

The first Columbus Day celebration was held in 1792, when New York City celebrated the 300th anniversary of his landing in the New World. In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison called upon the people of the United States to celebrate Columbus Day on the 400th anniversary of the event.

Some Italian-Americans observe Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage, the first occasion being in New York City on October 12, 1866. Columbus Day was popularized as a holiday in the United States by a lawyer, a son of Genoese immigrants who came to California. During the 1850s, Genoese immigrants settled and built ranches along the Sierra Nevada foothills. As the gold ran out, these skilled "Cal-Italians", from the Apennines, were able to prosper as self-sufficient farmers in the Mediterranean climate of Northern California. San Francisco has the second oldest Columbus Day celebration, with Italians having commemorated it there since 1869.

This lawyer then moved to Colorado, which had a population of Genoese miners, and where, in 1907, the first state-wide celebration was held. In 1934, at the behest of the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic fraternal service organization named for the voyager), Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set aside Columbus Day, October 12, as a Federal holiday (36 USC 107, ch. 184, 48 Stat. 657).

Since 1971, the holiday has been commemorated in the U.S. on the second Monday in October, the same day as Thanksgiving in neighboring Canada. It is generally observed today by banks, the bond market, the US Postal Service and other federal agencies, most state government offices, and many school districts; however, most businesses and stock exchanges remain open.

Hawaii

Discoverer's Day is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Hawaii; it honors Captain James Cook as the first European to document Hawaiian society

Hawaii does not officially honor Columbus day and instead celebrates Discoverer's Day on the same day, i.e., on the second Monday of each October. While many in Hawaii still celebrate the life of Columbus on Columbus Day, the alternative holiday also honors James Cook, the British navigator that became the first person to record the coordinates of the Hawaiian Islands and share with the world the existence of the ancient Hawaiian people and society. Some people interpret the holiday as a celebration of all discoveries relative to the ancient and modern societies of Hawaii. Neither Columbus Day nor Discoverer's Day is regarded as a holiday by State government; state, city and county government offices and schools are open for business on Columbus Day, while Federal government offices are closed.

Many Native Hawaiians decry the celebration of both Columbus and Cook, known to have committed acts of violent subjugation of native people. Discoverer's Day is a day of protest for some advocacy groups. A popular protest site is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace and the Chancery building of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu. Such advocacy groups have been commemorating the Discoverer's Day holiday as their own alternative, Indigenous Peoples Day. The week is called Indigenous Peoples Week.

Opposition to Columbus Day

In A People's History of the United States, American historian Howard Zinn discusses the cruelty Columbus inflicted upon Native Americans, which Zinn says was comparable to the genocidal acts of World War II. Zinn maintains Columbus was a religious fanatic with an obsession of eliminating non-Christians, by means of murder, conversion, or at the very least, enslavement. He claims that Columbus was in search of personal wealth and fame, and was willing to step over others or even kill them to achieve it, and that Columbus may have used more force than he admitted to his superiors. However, some assume that Columbus' subordinates were more responsible for the vast majority of the carnage carried out. Columbus himself claimed that he warned his men against taking advantage of the natives, as he had planned to eventually convert them to Christianity. A Spanish priest who traveled to Hispaniola wrote that he was appalled to witness dehumanizing acts of cruelty being inflicted on the Indians, such as torture used to subjugate their leaders. Many of the natives ended up dying from starvation, disease, or simply being overworked.

Opposition to the holiday cites this cruelty committed by those under Columbus' leadership and that of many of the following European colonists. Columbus directly brought about the demise of many Taino (Arawak) Indians on the island of Hispaniola, and the arrival of the Europeans indirectly caused the decline in population of many indigenous peoples by introducing diseases previously unknown in the New World. An estimated 85% of the Native American population was wiped out within 150 years of Columbus' arrival in America, due largely to diseases such as smallpox that spread among Native populations. Additionally, ensuing war and the appropriation of land and material wealth by European colonists also contributed to the decline of the indigenous populations in the Americas.

In the summer of 1990, 350 Native Americans, representatives from all over the hemisphere, met in Quito, Ecuador, at the first Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas, to mobilize against the quincentennial celebration of Columbus Day. The following summer, in Davis, California, more than a hundred Native Americans gathered for a follow-up meeting to the Quito conference. They declared October 12, 1992, International Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People. The largest ecumenical body in the United States, the National Council of Churches, called on Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying, "What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others."

Michael Berliner, of the Ayn Rand Institute, has defended celebration of Columbus Day, hailing the European conquest of North America and describing the indigenous culture as “a way of life dominated by fatalism, passivity, and magic.” Western civilization, Berliner claimed, brought “reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement” to a people who were based in “primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism”, and to a land that was “sparsely inhabited, unused, and underdeveloped.”

                                                                                              August Moon recipe

Animal crackers are crackers in the shapes of animals, some brands of which are sweetened. These are usually animals one would see at the zoo or circus, including lions, tigers, bears, and elephants. There is debate about whether or not Animal crackers are actually crackers or cookies. They are like crackers due to the way they are made, with layered dough, however the use of sweetened dough gives them the cookie taste and consistency. Traditionally they come in a box with a handle on the top. The string handle was originally added so that the box could be hung on a Christmas tree or house plant.

Barnum's Animals Crackers

Nabisco makes Barnum's Animal Crackers, arguably the most famous commercially produced version of the snack, due to the distinctive package art of a circus cage on wheels and full of animals. "Barnum" refers to the famous showman and circus entrepreneur P. T. Barnum. The product actually says "Barnum's Animals", subtitled "Crackers". At one time, the imprinted "wheels" bent around the bottom of the box, and the box's bottom was perforated to allow the wheels to be opened up straight and thus stand the box on its "wheels".

Austin, a division of the Keebler Company, also makes a variety of animal crackers. Although not nearly as popular, the Austin-variety has similar nutritional content and animal shapes.

Stauffer Biscuit Company of York, Pennsylvania also has a line of animal crackers, which are now distributed by several major discount retailers. Their use of the spices nutmeg and mace give the basic animal cracker a slightly different character from the Nabisco crackers.

The Borden corporation also produced a brand of animal crackers, until some time in the late 1970s. They came in a red box, which featured the famous Elsie the Cow logo.

History

In the late 1800s, animal-shaped cookies (or "biscuits" in British terminology) called "Animals" were imported from England to the United States. The demand for these crackers grew to the point that bakers began to produce them domestically. Stauffer’s Biscuit Company produced their first batch of animal crackers in 1871 in York, Pennsylvania. Other domestic bakeries, including the Dozier-Weyl Cracker Company of St. Louis and the Holmes and Coutts Company of New York City, were the predecessors of the National Biscuit Company, today's "Nabisco Brands".

Under the National Biscuit Company banner, animal biscuit crackers were made and distributed. It was in 1902 that animal crackers officially became "Barnum's Animals" and evoked the familiar circus time theme. Later in 1902, the now-familiar box was designed for the Christmas season with the innovative idea of attaching a string to hang from the Christmas tree. Up until that time, crackers were generally only sold in bulk (the proverbial "cracker barrel") or in large tins. These small cartons, which retailed for five cents at the time of their release, were a big hit and are still sold today.

The number and variety of contained in each box has varied over the years. In total, 54 different animals have been represented by animal crackers since 1902. In its current incarnation, each package contains 22 crackers consisting of a variety of animals. The most recent addition, the koala was added in September 2002 after being chosen by consumer votes, beating out the penguin, walrus and cobra.

In 1948, the company changed the product name to its current designation of "Barnum's Animal Crackers". Later, in 1958, production methods changed to improve the crackers' visual details. Until then animal shapes were stamped out of a dough sheet by a cutter. This produced outlines with little sophistication. By installing rotary dies, bakers actually engraved details onto each cracker, creating a much more intricate design. The rotary dies are still used today.

Barnum's Animal Crackers are all produced in the Fair Lawn, NJ Bakery by Nabisco Brands. More than 40 million packages of Barnum's Animal Crackers are sold each year, both in the United States and exported to 17 countries worldwide. The crackers are baked in a 300-foot (91 m) long traveling band oven. They are in the oven for about four minutes and are baked at the rate of 12,000 per minute. Fifteen thousand cartons and 300,000 crackers are produced in a single shift, using some thirty miles of string on the packages. This runs to nearly 8,000 miles (13,000 km) of string a year. Those bright circus boxes are produced in three colors - red, blue and yellow - with different variety of animals on each.

Varieties

Austin Zoo Animal Crackers currently feature bear, camel, elephant, rhinoceros, lion, monkey, owl, penguin, rabbit, ram, turtle, and zebra.

Cadburys Animals are Chocolate coated (although rather sparingly) and feature elephant, monkey, lion, tiger and hippo - all with nicknames and all rather the same shape.

Stauffer's animal crackers include a lion, elephant, mountain goat, cow, house cat, camel, tiger, horse, ibex, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, buffalo (or bison) and bear. They are made in plain, chocolate graham, cinnamon graham, cotton candy, and iced flavors, as well as "breakfast cookies" made with oats, almonds, cranberries, and pomegranate.

Kinnikinnick Foods, Inc. makes gluten-free, dairy-free animal cookies, called KinniKritters, that look and taste like animal crackers. They include a bighorn sheep, an elephant, a pig, a bison (maybe), a camel, and a horse.

Biscomerica Corp. makes Basil's Bavarian Bakery animal cookies, called Animal Snackers. They include a bear, camel, hippo, lion, and elephant.

In popular culture

An episode of The Simpsons called "Simpson Safari" featured the Simpsons winning an expired contest promoted by Animal Crackers.

In the 2007 film Zodiac Mark Ruffalo's character David Toschi often asks for animal crackers after being awakened in the early hours of the morning when new leads on the Zodiac Killer case are uncovered.

In 6th Season of ER (TV series) Carol Hathaway gets a huge box filled with Barnum's Animal Crackers as a birthday present from Doug Ross.

In the 1998 film Armageddon Ben Affleck's character does an Animal Cracker Discovery Channel thing to Liv Tyler's character, which can be found in the film's soundtrack.

The 1928 musical play Animal Crackers and its 1930 film adaptation Animal Crackers were early hits for the Marx Brothers.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) Season two "What's My Line Part 2" there is a mention of animal crackers: Oz: “Oh look! Monkey. And he has a little hat…and little pants.” Willow: “Yeah, I see.” Oz: “The monkey’s the only cookie animal that gets to wears clothes. You know that? … You have the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen.” Oz: “So I’m wondering, do the other cookie animals feel sorta ripped? Like is the hippo going, “Hey, man. Where are my pants? I have my hippo dignity.” And you know the monkey’s just, “I mock you with my monkey pants!” And then there’s a big coup in the zoo.” Willow: “The monkey is French?” Oz: “All monkeys are French. You didn’t know that?” Willow: “No.”

Manufacturers

• Keebler
• Nabisco
• Stauffer Biscuit Company

Did Mrs. O'Leary's cow start the Great Chicago Fire?

There's evidence that suggests she did. The conflagration almost surely began in the vicinity of the crowded family barn, where, in addition to a horse, a calf, and a wagon, Kate O'Leary kept the five cows she milked twice a day for her local dairy business. The O'Learys had just laid up plenty of coal, wood shavings, and hay to see them and their livestock through the winter--and to feed any fire once it got going. Kate supposedly revealed to different people the morning after the blaze began that she was in the barn when one of her cows kicked over a lantern. A few curiosity-seekers claimed to find the broken pieces of such a lantern while snooping behind her cottage, whose survival was one of the great ironies of the disaster.

But one can find good reason to think that poor Mrs. O'Leary and her benighted cow--named Daisy, Madeline, and Gwendolyn in assorted retellings--were innocent. There's testimony to corroborate Kate's contention that she was in bed early that evening, and the official inquiry found no proof of her guilt. Those who heard her "confess" offered different reasons why she said she was in the barn, and a person who years later said that as a boy he found the broken lamp under some floorboards and took it home never explained why the barn had floorboards at all or how they made it through the inferno. As for the lamp itself, he said that he couldn't produce it because an Irish servant, as part of a cover-up, "borrowed" it and then disappeared.

On top of this, on the fortieth anniversary of the great conflagration a police reporter named Michael Ahern, who was working for the Chicago Republican at the time of the fire, boasted in the Tribune that he and two now-deceased cronies made the whole thing up. The O'Leary's, he reminded readers, lived in the rear of 137 DeKoven, renting the front to a family named McLaughlin, who were hosting a party that evening. Ahern opined that one of the revelers went out to get milk for some punch and ended up burning Chicago down. To make the mystery murkier, the invention of the cow story has also been attributed to others, and after Ahern's revelation appeared a long-time colleague wrote to members of the O'Leary family telling them that he had ghost-written the Tribune story under Ahern's byline. As for Ahern himself, this other reporter confided, "The booze got him many years ago, and he has not been able to do any newspaper work."

Several additional theories surfaced then and since.

Some boys were sneaking a smoke. Spontaneous combustion. A fiery meteor that split into pieces as it fell to earth October 8, which explains the simultaneous catastrophes in Chicago and Peshtigo, Wisconsin, plus a lesser fire in Michigan. Daisy acted alone. Recently a researcher, working from property records and the post-fire inquiry, has argued that an O'Leary neighbor may have accidentally sparked the blaze.

Like the several cowbells that different people have sworn were the one the four-legged perpetrator (who herself perished in the fire) wore around her neck that fateful night, it is possible that any one of these theories has the truth behind it, but all of them are open to question.

In any case, the more intriguing issue is not the unresolvable one of whether the legend has any basis in fact, but why it has had so much continuing interest, why to the present day the story of Mrs. O'Leary's cow is above all others the one "fact" that almost everyone near and far recalls about the Great Fire, and, for that matter, about the history of Chicago.

The O'Leary story, true or not, has had such appeal because it offers a clear and specific cause for this otherwise overwhelming event, an imaginative handle by which people can take hold of it. Regardless of the inconclusiveness of the official investigation, at the time it also enabled people to blame someone in particular for what was a matter of collective responsibility and misfortune. In this respect it is noteworthy that the O'Leary legend found brief competition with a rumor that the fire was set by an unnamed member of a world-wide terrorist organization with direct ties to the 1871 Paris Commune. A local paper even published his "confession," and a poem that appeared in the New York Evening Post wondered out loud:

      Did out of [Paris's] ashes arise
           This bird with a flaming crest,
      That over the ocean unhindered flies,
           With a scourge for the Queen of the West?

But Mrs. O'Leary offered a far better scapegoat. While as a specific person she may or may not have been at fault, what she represented was a more plausible and acceptable cause for the fire. Unlike the Communard, she was a familiar and recognizable type who could readily be made to stand for careless building, sloppy conduct, and a shiftless immigrant underclass. Blaming her simply involved adapting existing anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments to the terrible calamity at hand. As a poor clumsy Irishwoman and not a sworn enemy of the social order, she was a disempowered comic stereotype, the damage she caused the result of accident, not conspiracy. Given that the catastrophe could not be undone, there was even something imaginatively satisfying in the tale that this epic fire had such a humble beginning.

The lasting nature of the O'Leary legend is attributable to the fact that she also was such a malleable figure, who could be used to discover and express different and even conflicting meanings. From the outset, people were interested not in knowing the real Catherine O'Leary, but in turning her into a repository for their presuppositions. She was in her early forties at the time of the fire, sober and hard-working. In some popular anecdotes and illustrations she was depicted as an aged crone and a drunkard. The Chicago Times, while not naming her specifically nor accusing her of setting the fire deliberately, described her as a welfare cheat who, "when cut off, vowed revenge." But as it became clear that the city had fully triumphed over catastrophe and was hurtling on to an even grander destiny, she became increasingly quaint and benign. In 1881 the Chicago Historical Society installed a marble plaque marking the spot on the much more solid home that had been built at 137 DeKoven. The alley behind the house became a kind of sacred site for local residents, who protested when the city finally filled it in and paved it two decades after the great conflagration. And when Chicago constructed a new fire academy in the early 1960s, it selected as the location the block where the calamity began.

Perhaps the most remarkable and fanciful reworking of the O'Leary legend was the 1938 movie, In Old Chicago. Kate O'Leary (played by Alice Brady, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress) is aged a decade or two and divested of her husband, as she is transformed into the spirited widow Molly O'Leary, who runs a successful hand laundry that caters to Chicago's fancy set. To her dismay, her son Dion (Tyrone Power) becomes an unprincipled saloon owner, but his brother Jack (Don Ameche) is an idealistic lawyer who is elected mayor on a reform platform. The centerpiece of his program is to level the firetrap neighborhoods in "the Patch" (evidently based on Conley's Patch) controlled by gamblers and political operators like his brother. Jack sacrifices his life for the city when, while he is trying to stop the fire, he is first shot by a corrupt political opponent and then crushed by a collapsing building.

Hearing this sad news from a now morally awakened Dion as they find refuge in the lake, Molly proudly rededicates the family to the building of a new and better Chicago. The unsinkable Molly is reconciled to Jack's death by her faith in a still greater future to come. For his part, Dion exultantly declares, "Nothing can lick Chicago." In this narrative with plot conventions shared with a long list of disaster stories (including Roe's Barriers Burned Away and MGM's disaster epic, San Francisco) Hollywood thus turned once-despised immigrants like the O'Learys into upwardly mobile middle-class champions of the Chicago booster dream. One glancing coincidence between actual events and this narrative that takes such vast liberties is that the O'Learys did have a son named Jim, who well after the fire was a politically connected saloon keeper and gambler in the stockyards district.

In Old Chicago does pin the fire's origin on Daisy, who does her dirty work when she is left alone for a moment by a distracted Molly. But this is almost incidental to the main plot, and there's no particular blame assigned. By this time the legend was a charming mainstay of American folklore, the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. Various local parades, commemorations, and promotions would feature a woman dressed up as Mrs. O'Leary leading Daisy. The winner of the National Trophy in the 1960 Rose Bowl Parade, whose grand marshal was Vice President Richard Nixon, was the City of Chicago float depicting Mrs. O'Leary's barn, complete with a lantern, simulated fire, genuine smoke, and a carnation-and-chrysanthemum cow. The theme of the parade was "Tall Tales and True."

Kate O'Leary, unfortunately, never got to enjoy any of this. She bemoaned her own losses by the fire, which included all the animals in the barn except the calf, but otherwise she tried to avoid the unwanted attention, including offers from promoters. She and her family moved to a series of homes around 50th and Halsted, where journalists would seek her out for interviews in early October. She would ignore them or chase them away, and they in turn would make up stories that revived the old stereotypes about the unwashed poor. In 1886, for example, a Daily News reporter whom she supposedly rebuffed described her home as follows: "The house has no front door, in lieu of glass clothing is stuffed into two or three windows, and long before a stranger reaches the place the pungent odor of distillery swill and the effluvium of cows proclaim that old habits are strong with Mrs. O'Leary and that she is still in the milk business." Patrick O'Leary died in September of 1894, and Catherine passed away the following Fourth of July.

Explanation of the Keys on a Windows QWERTY Keyboard

 Q  W  E  R  T  Y 

"The name "QWERTY" for our computer keyboard comes from the first six letters in the top alphabet row (the one just below the numbers). It is also referred to as the "Universal" keyboard. It was the work of inventor C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's."

Esc

Equivalent to clicking the Cancel button. In PowerPoint the Esc key will stop a running slide show. On a web page with animations, the Esc key will stop the animations. On a web page that is loading, the Esc key will stop the page from loading. The keyboard combination Ctrl + Esc will open the Start Menu.

While working in an application, depressing this key will bring up the applications help menu. If there is no open application F1 will open Windows Help.

F2

Choose this key to rename a selected item or object.

F3

Depressing this key will display the Find: All Files dialog box.

F4

Selects the Go To A Different Folder box and moves down the entries in the box (if the toolbar is active in Windows Explorer)

F5

Refreshes the current window. In Internet Explorer, F5 will Refresh the web page.

F6

Moves among panes in Windows Explorer.

F10

Activates menu bar options. Use right and left arrows to select menus and down arrows to display pull down menus.

F11

In Internet Explorer this key will allow you to toggle between full screen viewing mode and normal viewing mode.

Print Screen/SysRq

Usually located at the upper right hand corner of your keyboard next to the Scroll Lock and Pause/Break keys. Often abbreviated PrtScr, the Print Screen key is a useful key supported on most PCs. In DOS, pressing the Print Screen key causes the computer to send whatever images and text are currently on the display screen to the printer. Some graphics programs and Windows, use the Print Screen key to obtain Screen Captures.

Control Key

Ctrl

Depressing the Ctrl key while clicking allows multiple selections. Holding the Ctrl key down and pressing other key combinations will initiate quite a few actions. Some of the more common ones are listed below.

Ctrl + A

Select All items

Ctrl + B

Add or remove Bold formatting

Ctrl + C

Copy, places the selected/highlighted copy on the clipboard.

Ctrl + C + C

Opens the clipboard.

Ctrl + F

Opens the Find what: dialog box. Great for finding references on a web page while using your favorite web browser.

Ctrl + H

Replace, brings up the Find and Replace dialog box. Great for global find and replace routines while working in normal and html views in your favorite WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage. You can also use this to find and replace content within your Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, etc...

Ctrl + I

Add or remove Italic formatting.

Ctrl + N

Window, In Internet Explorer, opens a New Window. In Outlook, opens a New Mail Message. In most publishing programs like Word, opens a New Document.

Ctrl + O

Open, brings up a browse dialog and allows you to select a file to open.

Ctrl + P

Print

Ctrl + S

Save

Ctrl + U

Add or remove Underline formatting.

Ctrl + V

Paste, inserts the copy on the clipboard into the area where your flashing cursoris positioned or the area you have selected/highlighted.

Ctrl + W

Close, will close the document currently open.

Ctrl + X

Cut, removes the selected/highlighted copy and places it on the clipboard.

Ctrl + Y

Redo last command. Many software programs offer multiple Redo's by pressing Ctrl + Y + Y + Y...

Ctrl + Z

Undo last command. Many software programs offer multiple Undo's by pressing Ctrl + Z + Z + Z...

Ctrl + Esc

Open the Start menu (or use the Windows Key if you have one).

Ctrl + =

Spell checker (pre WinXP).

Ctrl

While dragging a file to copy the file.

Ctrl + Shift

While dragging a file to create a shortcut.

Ctrl + Tab

Allows movement (toggle) from one open window to the next in an application with more than one open window.

Ctrl + F4

Close a window in an application without closing the application.

Ctrl + F5

In Internet Explorer, Ctrl + F5 will Refresh the web page bypassing cache (all images and external file references will be reloaded).

Windows Key

  Windows Key

On either side of the spacebar, outside the Alt key, is a key with the Windows logo. Holding the Windows key down and pressing another key will initiate quite a few actions. Some of the more common are listed in the table below:

 

Displays the Start Menu.

  + D

Minimizes all windows and shows the Desktop.

  + D

Opens all windows and takes you right back to where you were.

  + E

Opens a new Explorer Window. Probably one of the hottest Windows keyboard shortcuts. This one gets a lot of hoorahs!

  + F

Displays the Find all files dialog box.

  + L

Lock your Windows XP computer. Logoff in Windows Pre-XP.

  + M

Minimizes all open windows.

  + Shift + M

Restores all previously open windows to how they were before you Minimized them.

  + R

Displays the Run command.

  + F1

Displays the Windows Help menu.

  + Pause/Break

Displays the Systems Properties dialog box.

  + Tab

Cycle through the buttons on the Task Bar.

Alt

Alt

Located on either side of the space bar. Holding the Alt key down and pressing another key will initiate various actions. Some of the more common ones are listed below:

Alt + F4

Closes the current active window. If there is no active window this opens the Shut Down dialog box.

Alt + underlined letter in menu

To carry out the corresponding command on the menu.

Alt + left/right arrows

In a browser moves forward or back through the pages visited in a window.

Alt + Space Bar

Displays the current window's system menu. This is the same as left clicking on the application icon at the top left of the window.

Alt + Enter

Displays a selected items properties. This can also be done with Alt + double-click.

Alt + PrtScn

Captures the top window of the active application.

Alt + Space Bar

Displays the main window's system menu. This is the same as clicking on the application icon at the left end of the title bar.

Alt + Space Bar + C

After the system menu is displayed (see above), this combination will close a window. This works the same way as Alt + F4 but requires less stretch.

Alt + - (hyphen)

Displays the current window's system menu. This is the same as left clicking on the application icon at the top left of the window.

Alt + Tab

Displays a list of open application windows. Keeping Alt depressed and selecting Tab cycles through the list. Releasing selects the highlighted application window.

Alt  Ctrl

The Application key has an image of a mouse pointer on a menu (between the Alt and Ctrl keys () to the right of your Space Bar). Depressing this key will display the selected item's shortcut window. This is the menu that is displayed by right-clicking.

Space Bar

Insert a space between words. It is suggested that you utilize Tabs (or other formatting commands) to put distance between elements. Using the space bar to insert visual space works but would not be considered a best practice in page design. Double spaces between sentences are no longer required. This is a carryover from the days of fixed width fonts on a typewriter such as Courier, Orator, Prestige Elite, etc.

Pressing the Space Bar while viewing a web page in Internet Explorer will scroll the page downwards. Shift + Space Bar will scroll the page upwards.

Enter

Creates a new Paragraph <p> () or what is referred to as a Hard Return. In any dialog box a selected button or command can be selected by depressing this key. Selected buttons can be recognized by their darker (dotted) borders, or what is referred to as Focus.

Contact lenses were first sketched out by Leonardo da Vinci in 1508 but the first wearable pair was not made until 1887 by a German glassblower? Pretty cool! I didn't know they were that old. Now an estimated 125 million people wear them worldwide. Including me.

A contact lens (also known simply as a contact) is a corrective, cosmetic, or therapeutic lens usually placed on the cornea of the eye. Modern soft contact lenses were invented by the Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim, who also invented the first gel used for their production.

Contact lenses usually serve the same corrective purpose as conventional glasses, but are lightweight and virtually invisible—many commercial lenses are tinted a faint blue to make them more visible when immersed in cleaning and storage solutions. Some cosmetic lenses are deliberately colored to alter the appearance of the eye.

It has been estimated that 125 million people use contact lenses worldwide (2%), including 28 to 38 million in the United States and 13 million in Japan. The types of lenses used and prescribed vary markedly between countries, with rigid lenses accounting for over 20% of currently-prescribed lenses in Japan, Netherlands and Germany but less than 5% in Scandinavia.

People choose to wear contact lenses for many reasons, often due to their appearance and practicality. Contact lenses are less affected by wet weather, do not steam up, and provide a wider field of vision. They are more suitable for a number of sporting activities. Additionally, ophthalmological conditions such as keratoconus and aniseikonia may not be accurately corrected with glasses.  

History

In 1887, Adolf Fick was apparently the first to successfully fit contact lenses, which were made from blown glass

Leonardo da Vinci is frequently credited with introducing the general principle of contact lenses in his 1508 Codex of the eye, Manual D, where he described a method of directly altering corneal power by submerging the eye in a bowl of water. Leonardo, however, did not suggest his idea be used for correcting vision—he was more interested in learning about the mechanisms of accommodation of the eye.

René Descartes proposed another idea in 1636, in which a glass tube filled with liquid is placed in direct contact with the cornea. The protruding end was to be composed of clear glass, shaped to correct vision; however the idea was impracticable, since it would make blinking impossible.

In 1801, while conducting experiments concerning the mechanisms of accommodation, scientist Thomas Young constructed a liquid-filled "eyecup" which could be considered a predecessor to the contact lens. On the eyecup's base, Young fitted a microscope eyepiece. However, like Leonardo's, Young's device was not intended to correct refraction errors.

Sir John Herschel, in a footnote of the 1845 edition of the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, posed two ideas for the visual correction: the first "a spherical capsule of glass filled with animal jelly", and "a mould of the cornea" which could be impressed on "some sort of transparent medium". Though Herschel reportedly never tested these ideas, they were both later advanced by several independent inventors such as Hungarian Dr. Dallos (1929), who perfected a method of making molds from living eyes. This enabled the manufacture of lenses that, for the first time, conformed to the actual shape of the eye.

It was not until 1887 that a German glassblower, F.E. Muller, produced the first eye covering to be seen through and tolerated. In the next year, the German physiologist Adolf Eugen Fick constructed and fitted the first successful contact lens. While working in Zürich, he described fabricating afocal scleral contact shells, which rested on the less sensitive rim of tissue around the cornea, and experimentally fitting them: initially on rabbits, then on himself, and lastly on a small group of volunteers. These lenses were made from heavy brown glass and were 18–21mm in diameter. Fick filled the empty space between cornea/callosity and glass with a dextrose solution. He published his work, "Contactbrille", in the journal Archiv für Augenheilkunde in March 1888.

Fick's lens was large, unwieldy, and could only be worn for a few hours at a time. August Müller in Kiel, Germany, corrected his own severe myopia with a more convenient glass-blown scleral contact lens of his own manufacture in 1888.

Also in 1887, Louis J. Girard invented a similar scleral form of contact lens.

Glass-blown scleral lenses remained the only form of contact lens until the 1930s when polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA or Perspex/Plexiglas) was developed, allowing plastic scleral lenses to be manufactured for the first time. In 1936, optometrist William Feinbloom introduced plastic lenses, making them lighter and more convenient. These lenses were a combination of glass and plastic.

In 1949, the first "corneal" lenses were developed. These were much smaller than the original scleral lenses, as they sat only on the cornea rather than across all of the visible ocular surface, and could be worn up to sixteen hours per day. PMMA corneal lenses became the first contact lenses to have mass appeal through the 1960s, as lens designs became more sophisticated with improving manufacturing (lathe) technology.

One important disadvantage of PMMA lenses is that no oxygen is transmitted through the lens to the conjunctiva and cornea, which can cause a number of adverse clinical effects. By the end of the 1970s, and through the 1980s and 1990s, a range of oxygen-permeable but rigid materials were developed to overcome this problem. Collectively, these polymers are referred to as "rigid gas permeable" or "RGP" materials or lenses. Although all the above lens types—sclerals, PMMA lenses and RGPs—could be correctly referred to as being "hard" or "rigid", the term hard is now used to refer to the original PMMA lenses which are still occasionally fitted and worn, whereas rigid is a generic term which can be used for all these lens types. That is, hard lenses (PMMA lenses) are a sub-set of rigid lenses. Occasionally, the term "gas permeable" is used to describe RGP lenses, but this is potentially misleading, as soft lenses are also gas permeable in that they allow oxygen to move through the lens to the ocular surface.

The principal breakthrough in soft lenses was made by the Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim who published their work "Hydrophilic gels for biological use" in the journal Nature in 1959. This led to the launch of the first soft (hydrogel) lenses in some countries in the 1960s and the first approval of the "Soflens" material by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1971. These lenses were soon prescribed more often than rigid lenses, mainly due to the immediate comfort of soft lenses; by comparison, rigid lenses require a period of adaptation before full comfort is achieved. The polymers from which soft lenses are manufactured improved over the next 25 years, primarily in terms of increasing the oxygen permeability by varying the ingredients making up the polymers.

In 1999, an important development was the launch of the first silicone hydrogels onto the market. These new materials encapsulated the benefits of silicone—which has extremely high oxygen permeability—with the comfort and clinical performance of the conventional hydrogels which had been used for the previous 30 years. These lenses were initially advocated primarily for extended (overnight) wear although more recently, daily (no overnight) wear silicone hydrogels have been launched.

Types of contact lenses

Contact lenses are classified in many different manners.

By function

Corrective contact lenses

A corrective contact lens is a lens designed to improve vision. In many people, there is a mismatch between the refractive power of the eye and the length of the eye, leading to a refraction error. A contact lens neutralizes this mismatch and allows for correct focusing of light onto the retina. Conditions correctable with contact lenses include near (or short) sightedness (myopia), far (or long) sightedness (hypermetropia), astigmatism and presbyopia. Contact wearers must usually take their contacts out every night or every few days, depending on the brand and style of the contact. Recently there has been renewed interest in orthokeratology, the correction of myopia by deliberate overnight flattening of the cornea, leaving the eye without contact lens or eyeglasses correction during the day.

For those with certain color deficiencies, a red-tinted "X-Chrom" contact lens may be used. Although the lens does not restore normal color vision, it allows some colorblind individuals to distinguish colors better.

ChromaGen lenses have been used and these have been shown to have some limitations with vision at night although otherwise producing significant improvements in colour vision. An earlier study showed very significant improvements in colour vision and patient satisfaction

Later work that used these ChromaGen lenses with dyslexics in a randomised, double-blind, placebo controlled trial showed highly significant improvements in reading ability over reading without the lenses This system has been granted FDA approval in the United States.

 Cosmetic contact lenses

A cosmetic contact lens is designed to change the appearance of the eye. These lenses may also correct the vision, but some blurring or obstruction of vision may occur as a result of the color or design. In the United States, the FDA frequently calls non-corrective cosmetic contact lenses decorative contact lenses.

Theatrical contact lenses are a type of cosmetic contact lens that are used primarily in the entertainment industry to make the eye appear pleasing, unusual or unnatural in appearance, most often in horror and zombie movies, where lenses can make one's eyes appear demonic, cloudy and lifeless, or even to make the pupils of the wearer appear dilated to simulate the natural appearance of the pupils under the influence of various illicit drugs.

Scleral lenses cover the white part of the eye (i.e. sclera) and are used in many theatrical lenses. Due to their size, these lenses are difficult to insert and do not move very well within the eye. They may also hamper the vision as the lens has a small area for the user to see through. As a result they generally cannot be worn for more than 3 hours as they can cause temporary vision disturbances.

Similar lenses have more direct medical applications. For example, some lenses can give the iris an enlarged appearance, or mask defects such as absence (aniridia) or damage (dyscoria) to the iris.

Although many brands of contact lenses are lightly tinted to make them easier to handle, cosmetic lenses worn to change the color of the eye are far less common, accounting for only 3% of contact lens fits in 2004.

 Therapeutic contact lenses

Soft lenses are often used in the treatment and management of non-refractive disorders of the eye. A bandage contact lens protects an injured or diseased cornea from the constant rubbing of blinking eyelids thereby allowing it to heal.^[32] They are used in the treatment of conditions including bullous keratopathy, dry eyes, corneal ulcers and erosion, keratitis, corneal edema, descemetocele, corneal ectasis, Mooren's ulcer, anterior corneal dystrophy, and neurotrophic keratoconjunctivitis. Contact lenses that deliver drugs to the eye have also been developed.

By constructional material