Word: balloon
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...Auguste Piccard put her foot down. Middle-aged professors, she declared, especially her husband, should not risk their lives year after year making record-breaking balloon flights into the stratosphere. To her surprise, Professor Piccard solemnly promised to stay out of balloons...
Instead Piccard designed a free-cruising "underwater balloon" which he named a bathyscaphe.- It had a small, thick-walled steel sphere to resist the pressure of the depths and a thin-walled hull filled with light, almost incompressible gasoline to give it buoyancy. For cruising, it used electricity from storage batteries to drive a small propeller...
...gulls can be heard in the morning, and there are crokers in the Lowell courtyard. By the Charles grow pussywillows; the balloon man is coming. Far and whee...
...operation began when a Thor rocket took off from Cape Canaveral just before dawn carrying a canister containing a tightly folded deflated balloon of plastic film and aluminum foil. This was Echo A12, an experimental successor to Echo I, the 100-ft. radio-reflector that was launched on Aug. 12, 1960, and is still orbiting the earth. Echo A12 was not expected to orbit; its job was merely to expand in space and test a new kind of aluminized film that would stay rigid after the gas that blew up the balloon had escaped through meteor punctures...
Scientists gathered around a TV screen at Cape Canaveral, watched the canister soar free. Out swelled the silvery balloon. It took shape swiftly-too swiftly. The balloon expanded to its full 135-ft-diameter in two seconds. Then a rip raced across the silvery skin; almost instantaneously the great balloon tore into shapeless shreds. The pictures were so good that they could be reshown on household TV sets. Back to the drawing boards went Echo A12's designers. But airborne TV had already told them what had gone wrong: Echo A12 contained too much residual air, which made...