Word: arcs
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...every 10,000-ton freighter were battered over a half-million rivets. In many modern ships nearly all these rivets have been eliminated. Result is that shipyards today are much quieter, and to gapers outside their guarded walls the chief evidence of activity within is the firefly flashing of arc welders clambering among the hulls...
Commonest form of welding used today is arc welding. An arc welder has for his tool a device that holds a pencil-sized metal rod carrying a heavy (around 200 amps) electric current of low voltage. When he brings the rod close to the metal to be welded, the current leaps across the near-contact, forming a blinding arc whose temperature-some 6,500° F.-melts both the rod and the metal being welded into tiny molten pools which quickly cool into solid metal. Since the welder's rod (called an electrode) melts down like a candle...
...welding arc that if it is held more than an instant on one spot, it will eat a hole through a thick steel plate. With his brilliant sputtering arc always in motion, a masked welder "knits" a seam by laying molten steel deposits endlessly atop each other...
Some welding on ships was attempted in World War I, but its failures impressed engineers more than its successes: no protective coating for the rods had been developed, so the arcs were not gas-shielded, and the welded seams were of inferior metal; the arcs' temperatures were hard to control, and welded plates often heat-warped. Development of the arc-shielding coating by Milwaukee's A. O. Smith Corp. at last gave arc welding the reliability it needed...
...fight with the Germans in Russia, someone murdered his secretary in Paris. The Nazis were said to have shot twelve Rumanian Generals who were unwilling to continue fighting Russia. In Yugoslavia open warfare continued between Nazi mechanized divisions and the Chetnik guerrillas. (Reports told of a Serbian "Joan of Arc" who led an attack on the town of Sabac.) In Greece the Nazis executed 40 student demonstrators. The exiled Greek Government reported the Germans had wrenched off one rebel's arms, had buried alive three Greeks whose executioners succeeded only in wounding them. Exiled Greek Premier Emmanuel Tsouderos cried...