Word: calcium
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sherlock Holmes would have been at home in Brazil, land of the needle. Brazilians consider an injection, rather than a pill, the handiest way to cure anything from calcium deficiency to syphilis. Stenographers inject each other with vitamin compounds at tea time. Druggists give shots to customers in back rooms, send errand boys out to needle homebound clients. The charge: 15?. Thus, when the Government last fortnight banned drugstore injections, it threatened the clinical habits of a nation. Grounds: insanitary needles. Real reason: the dope needle was also flourishing...
When the rocket is fired, the first gadget to start is a compact turbine developing 580 horsepower and driven by steam from a chemical reaction involving sodium or calcium permanganate and hydrogen peroxide. This runs pumps which force liquid oxygen and alcohol into the bulb-shaped combustion chamber. Reacting fiercely, they shoot a blast of gases through a venturi ring at about 6,000 ft. a second...
When a Negro boy in Charleston, S.C. was bitten, the doctors began running through the usual drugs. But 45 minutes after the injection of calcium gluconate, the boy still cried out with pain. After another shot he seemed to get worse. A slow injection of salt and sugar was no help; pentobarbital sodium, codeine and Aspirin left him still twitching on the bed. Pentobarbital sodium was tried again, to no effect...
Undaunted, Potter Palmer built a new hotel (the first fireproof one in the U.S.), worked under calcium lights at night to have it open before the rival Grand Pacific Hotel. When Palmer lost, he grimly built a board-and-shingled shack in the lobby of his $2,500,000 hotel, labeled it: "This is what the Grand Pacific is made of." In time, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright ridiculed the gingerbready Palmer House as "an ugly old man whose wrinkles were all in the wrong place...
Portuguese growers in the Azores knew a century ago that burning wood in their hothouses made the pineapples ripen quicker. (It was the ethylene gas in the wood smoke.) Following the principle, Hawaiian pineapple-growers have long been dropping pellets of calcium carbide into the hearts of their yucca-like pineapple plants. Moistened by dew, the pellets give off acetylene (similar to ethylene) which makes the plants bear earlier...