Word: airtight
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...mechanical engineering at the University of Brussels, but his first love was always the free-ballooning he did with his twin brother Jean. After years of practice in conventional balloons, the tall, scrawny professor with his outlandish head of wispy white hair, designed his own gasbag, his own spherical, airtight gondola, squeezed into the risky contraption one morning in 1931 and climbed 51,775 ft. over Augsburg, Bavaria-almost two miles higher than any airplane had yet flown. Just a year later Professor Piccard soared aloft to set a second altitude record...
...strapped into an elaborate device that looked a little like an old-fashioned baby carriage with a convertible hood. When the B58 reached 20,000 ft. and was flying at 565 m.p.h., Murray pulled a lever. The hood of his seat closed over him, sealing him into an airtight, 700-lb. capsule. Doors opened in the top of the cockpit, and two small rockets fired, blasting Murray and his capsule 250 ft. into the wind. For an instant he felt a 15-G jolt, but the hard-fingered wind never touched his body. At 15,000 ft., a small parachute...
...prosecution intends to use during the trial. Confronted with this enormous quantity of paperwork, they have asked for a postponement. The trial is now expected to begin in mid-April. In downtown Jerusalem, Ministry of Justice officials still labor late into the night to make their case even more airtight, as if determined to live up to Eichmann's own puzzling estimate: "The Jews must be a people of the first magnitude, for lawgivers have always been great...
...four to the penny, only some 500,000 of the 750 million issued since 1860 crossed their counters. Where were all the others? Many are lost or lying forgotten in toy cupboards. Some are on kitchen shelves, since British housewives believe nothing makes a jar of preserved fruit so airtight as jamming a farthing under the spring clip on each top. Others are holding up girls' stockings, a farthing being just the right size to substitute for a missing thingumbob on a garter belt. Millions of others have been laid by as souvenirs. There may yet come...
Mongols abstain from marrying for three years. Moslems may call in a professional prayer artist, who prays into an airtight goatskin until he has blown it squeaky-full of airy prayer, which he sells at so much a squirt...