Word: acridity
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Over the mud flats of the Isle of Grain, 40 miles down the Thames from London, rose a strange new smell. It was the acrid odor of distilling oil from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.'s Kent refinery, which went into operation last week. When it gets into full production late this year, the $112 million refinery will boost the company's output of gasoline and other petroleum products by 80,000 bbls. a day-1½ times as much as all of Britain's prewar capacity...
...quiet, lazy Sunday morning last October, Jack Bamford, a boy apprentice miner, was awakened in the Bamford cottage in Newthorpe, near Nottingham, by the acrid smell of wood smoke. He roused his dad, who is a miner. They ran downstairs into a roaring fire at the foot of the stairway, and together rescued Mrs. Bamford and three of the children. Then they remembered Brian, 6, and Roy, 4. They were trapped in Jack's back bedroom; and the second floor was in flames. Father wrapped himself in a blanket and tried to rush upstairs, but fell back before...
...tears dribbled down his pillow as he remembered the acrid exchange of words with his roommate. He regretted those scornful words now. His roommate had slammed the door, and gone the Class of '52 reunion anyway...
Chemist Duisberg had begun his own experiments with the creosote bush (Larrea divaricata), an acrid, sticky evergreen that thrives in millions of acres of drought-stricken wasteland. Last winter, using a distilling apparatus made from junkheap parts, Duisberg showed how to turn the hardy bush into a palatable stock feed.* With one byproduct already available to increase the margin of profit (nordihydroguaiaretic acid, a fat preservative that brings $35 a lb.), he managed to develop another: a quick-drying varnish that is almost certain to be salable. Other promising plants on Duisberg's list...
...loose ends after the war, he trekked west to San Francisco and took a job as watchman at the U.S. mint. On the side, he read Gibbon and Pope, minted an acrid style of his own. In 1867, he managed to get a grisly romantic poem published in the Californian, and from then on journalism, more accurately, invective journalism, was his business...