Word: blackouts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...power feeder lines, strained beyond capacity by the extra demands of air conditioners and electric fans during one of New York's worst heat waves, cut off, blacking out a five-square-mile slice of Manhattan with a population of 500,000. At about 3 p.m., the blackout shadows fell impartially across every social stratum in the nation's most complex city: millionaires in air-cooled Park Avenue apartments sweated in the unaccustomed heat, while across Central Park, Puerto Rican kids swarmed from the tenements and splashed happily in the sluice of fire hydrants, which the cops thoughtfully...
...problems caused by the. blackout, it brought at least one strange and encouraging result. The blacked-out area included some of New York's toughest neighborhoods, where crime rates run high and the tensions of race and color flow easily into violence. Expecting the worst, Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy kept 2,000 day-shift cops on overtime duty, sent prowl cars with loudspeakers through the streets to warn people to stay at home. But Kennedy need not have bothered: during the 13 hours before all the lights came back on, the crime rate plunged to almost nothing. Said...
...altitude plastic balloons. Last May 10 they heard from astronomers that an unusually powerful flare had erupted on the sun. As they readied their great balloons, a telephone call came from Alaska; Astrophysicist Harold Leinbach was reporting that his radio telescope at College (near Fairbanks) had detected a sudden blackout of radio noise from space. This indicated, said Leinbach, that a great swarm of particles from the sun was hitting the atmosphere...
...their ink reserves, but could hardly hope to keep publishing much longer. And with publishers and strikers reluctant to compromise ("This," said an official of the Ministry of Labor, "is the most intractable strike we have known in years"), England faced the melancholy prospect of a near-complete newspaper blackout, with only two daily papers likely to continue publishing. The exceptions: the Manchester Guardian and London's Communist Daily Worker, which have ample reserves...
Keep Out. As the days wore on, the rumor spread that the princess herself had ordered the blackout in retaliation for the mob scene at the airport ("And that is not far from the truth," admitted an embassy official in private). The dismal climax came when she paid her call on the Federation of British Industries' fair-the purpose of her trip in the first place. Not only were the Portuguese barred and all entrances locked (though the British exhibitors were allowed in), but Margaret was followed about by six burly, khaki-uniformed members of Her Majesty...