Word: bertha
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...Russia's Berthas are adolescent sisters of the Big Berthas which Germany turned on Paris in 1918 from the St. Gobain Forest 74.5 miles away. Big Bertha was a 15-inch gun, relined to 8.26 inches...
...mile a second. They rose at an angle of 50°, hit the stratosphere ten miles up, traveled through its rarefied atmosphere to a height of 24 miles before starting down. The earth's rotation had to be calculated in elevating (for range) and laying (for deflection) Big Bertha, for as the earth turned Paris toward the shells she lofted, it tended to make Bertha overshoot. At best her aim could not be relied on within a target area smaller than two miles long by three-quarters of a mile wide, and even the weather made a big difference...
...best new numbers is Mene, Mene, Tekel, a rousing piece of Biblical hotcha. Another is Bertha the Sewing Machine Girl, a funnier burlesque than the usual beer-&-pretzels music-hall version, which achieves "social significance" through its injunction to the innocent Bertha that "it's better with a union man." Best number in the show is The Harmony Boys, in which Father Coughlin, Fritz Kuhn and Senator Reynolds go into an uproarious song-&-dance, muttering lines like these of Fritz...
...stepped up its power, came in louder and chummier than General Electric's broadcasts from Schenectady. Last week General Electric announced a crushing countermove. Ready to go into action within a month is a new 100-kilowatt shortwave transmitter, most powerful in the U. S., known as "Big Bertha." It has directional antennae that will enable it to focus its beam on particular areas. Through G. E.'s two Schenectady stations, W2XAF and W2XAD, Big Bertha will broadcast in Portuguese to South America's eastern half, in Spanish to the western half...
...engineers hope Big Bertha will be powerful enough to come in clearer than its German rivals. Its news will certainly be more credible. Hundreds of South American listeners have lately written to U. S. stations that they regard European newscasts as blatantly biased, those from the U. S. as objective. Said one: "Station W2XAF is considered a semi-official news bureau here. . . . When "we do not hear it, we ignore the news, particularly the foreign news...