Word: 1800s
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Fuel cells were invented in the 1800s and adopted by NASA for generating clean power in space in the 1960s. Only in the past decade have they been made small enough to fit inside a car. The NECAR4, based on a Mercedes-Benz A-class compact sedan, accommodates five people plus luggage, reaches speeds of 90 m.p.h. (145 km/h) and goes about 280 miles (450 km) between fill-ups. "It's comparable," says Ferdinand Panik, head of DaimlerChrysler's Fuel Cell Project, "to the impact the microchip had on computer technology...
...soon as they ceased to be useful to us, we were going to send them back," Wang said, summarizing U.S. attitudes toward Asians in the late 1800s...
Physicists didn't figure this out until the 1800s, so at least the early advocates of perpetual motion had the excuse of ignorance. In 1618, for example, a London doctor named Robert Fludd invented a waterwheel that needed no river to drive it. Water poured into his system would, in theory, turn a wheel that would power a pump that would cause the water to flow back over the wheel that would power the pump, and so on. But the second law means that any friction created by wheel and pump would turn into heat and noise; reconverting that into...
...more saints than any other Pope, plans on Sept. 3 to declare two of his predecessors blessed. The elevation of John XXIII, hero of the progressive Vatican II initiatives of the early 1960s, will raise no hackles, but that of Pius IX, an oppressor of Jews in the mid-1800s, will. (The march toward canonization of another Pius--XII--has stalled in the face of renewed charges that he stood by silently during the Holocaust.) John Paul also plans to bestow sainthood on two women this year--the Polish nun Faustina Kowalska, who died in a Nazi concentration camp...
Windsor, Ont., just across the Canadian border from Detroit, has always been a refuge for Americans whose proclivities run counter to the prevailing laws of the U.S. In the mid-1800s, runaway slaves made their way to freedom there via the Underground Railroad. During Prohibition, Al Capone's boys smuggled rum from Windsor. And rebels are still attracted to Windsor. These days, though, they come not for liberty or libations but to buy toilets...