Word: boilers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From his childhood years. Skinner was mechanically inclined. He built roller-skate scooters, steerable wagons, rafts, water pistols from lengths of bamboo, and "from a discarded water boiler a steam cannon with which I could shoot plugs of potato and carrot over the houses of our neighbors." He also devised a flotation system to separate green from ripe elderberries, which he used to sell from door to door. Although his attempts to build a glider and a perpetual motion machine ended in failure, his innovative tinkering was to pay off handsomely in the laboratory in later years...
...preservation of Liberman's peculiar touch on such a scale is impressive. Where, for instance, did he get the great squashed cylinder that went into Ascent, 1970 (opposite)! "Well," says Liberman in the tone of a watercolorist explaining a wash, "we got two bulldozers and ran the boiler against a tree until it looked right." And if it had looked wrong? "Then another boiler, I suppose...
From his gypsy forebears, John Miller inherited an idiosyncratic custom. For four generations, the Millers have carefully guarded a small green leather pouch containing coins and a knotted red cloth, that was said to keep ill fortune from the family as long as it remained unopened. Miller, a boiler repairman in Tempe, Ariz., protected himself by storing the pouch in a safe deposit box in the vaults of the Tempe branch of the First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Phoenix...
Surprisingly, one of the most talked-about substitutes is the old-fashioned steam engine, which enabled the Stanley Steamer to reign briefly in the early part of the century as queen of the road. The steamer was dethroned because it was costly to buy, its water boiler required constant replenishment, and it was slow to start. Today, in corporate laboratories and amateur workshops all across the country, tinkerers and dreamers are trying to overcome these formidable obstacles...
...calf to leave the track. It only meandered slowly along, just a "lectle grain ahead." They all returned finally to the train. Bill furiously swearing, "By the holy horns of Beelzebub, if I bust my biler, I'll run that blasted critter down." The tender was emptied into the boiler, and the fireman sat on the safety-valve, and we ploughed along like an enraged elephant whose legs have been cut off by a circular saw. Still that calf kept a "lectle mite ahead," now and then playfully tapping the boiler front with its hind feet. At last...