Word: acidity
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Twenty-five seconds of radio silence mushroomed last week into a pressagent's dream. Acid-tongued Fred Allen started it on Sunday night with a verbal swat at NBC's executives: "There is a little man in the company we work for. He is a vice president in charge of program ends. . . ." After the first eleven words, NBC huffily...
...winter wheat had been destroyed by Europe's winter. He described some shocking contradictions in policy. Europe's soil was exhausted. And yet, Hoover charged, "we, including our Allies, have been as busy as bees destroying the capacity to manufacture fertilizers." German nitrogen and phosphoric acid plants were being dynamited because they could be converted to munitions manufacture. The world's total nitrogen production (2,600,000 tons) is more than 1,000,000 tons short of world requirements...
Ammonium nitrate, whose blast wrecked Texas City last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) is all too easy to make. The recipe: add ammonia to dilute nitric acid...
Chemically, ammonium nitrate is a salt, a combination of a base and an acid. But it is far from peaceful, as most other salts are. Instead of having a metal (e.g., sodium or iron) as the basic part of its molecule, it has an ammonium "radical" (one nitrogen atom and four hydrogen atoms) masquerading as a metal. Its acid part is also a radical: one nitrogen and three oxygen atoms (see chart...
...July 20 attempt failed for just as unpredictable reasons. The bomb exploded as planned (it was of the same type as the airplane bomb, timed not by telltale clockwork but by the action of acid on a taut wire). Also as planned, Hitler was in the room. At the moment of the explosion he was leaning on the map table under which the bomb had been planted. A few seconds before, however, someone had slightly shifted Stauffenberg's briefcase, so that, instead of lying practically at Hitler's feet, it lay behind a table leg. The day, moreover...