Word: belled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Twelve minutes after the 12,000 telephone operators of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Co. walked out, Governor Alfred E. Driscoll invoked a one-year-old law prohibiting strikes against public utilities, seized the company and ordered the strikers back to work. But because the law provided no penalties, the strikers, mostly women, went calmly about their picketing. Next day the legislature rammed through a penalty clause: strikers who did not return to work now could be fined $250 to $500 a day, and jailed up to 30 days for every day they stayed out. The striking unions could...
...apparatus was simple: a galvanized iron washtub with a strong light above it, and a loud electric bell hung inside its rim. Dr. Hall put his mice in the tub in small groups, and watched them for two minutes. The brown mice were slightly more nervous than the black, but also bolder: they ventured more frequently into the middle...
Then Dr. Hall rang the bell. At the terrifying sound, the black mice tended to crouch and "freeze." The brown mice scurried around the tub, 93% of them falling in convulsions. Nearly all of the ones with convulsions died. Nearly all the strong-nerved black mice survived the bell...
...Hall put these prenatal stepchildren into his tub and gave them the bell treatment. All had convulsions; two-thirds died. None behaved like noise-resistant black mice. This indicated, said Dr. Hall, that the tendency to die of audiogenic seizures is hereditary, carried by a gene in the germ plasm...
Final problem: Was this gene a "dominant" or a "recessive?" To find out, Dr. Hall mated brown mice with black mice. When their hybrid offspring were tried in the tub, nearly all died in convulsions at the sound of the fatal bell. This proved (according to Mendel's law of heredity) that the jittery gene was dominant. A recessive gene would not have expressed itself until the next generation...