Word: clockworks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...electric fuse charged by current flowing through a long telescopic arm at the moment of release. When the bomb hit the ground, the shock worked a "trembler switch" that touched off the bomb's main charge. After 14 years, these electric fuses are dead, but what about the clockwork fuses used to back them up? Answer: a magnetic clock-stopper to freeze the mechanism...
...best in the world, within sight and sound of the heart of London." He kept his promise grandly. London's great Westminster clock was soon overseeing London's pace, keeping accurate time within a tenth of a second a day; one of its few respites from clockwork occurred in World War II when its works were shaken during a German air raid. One morning last week, when its hands stood at 11 o'clock and its sonorous bell, nicknamed Big Ben after Sir Benjamin, boomed the hour (in E below middle C), Prime Minister Harold Macmillan...
Quarles's death shocked Washington. Day before, he had apparently been in the best of health. Like clockwork he had followed a normally busy schedule: a National Security Council meeting, lunch at his desk with Presidential Science Adviser James Killian, a conference with Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, a briefing on progress of the Air Force's nuclear powered airplane, a dinner party at the Metropolitan Club, and an Air Force concert at the Lisner Auditorium. But Quarles's death was more upsetting for its effect on the Pentagon. After two years as Defense Secretary, Neil McElroy planned...
Orange-Juice Victory. The first balloon rose properly to 70,000 ft., but the rocket hanging under it did not fire. The second Rockoon behaved in the same maddening way. On the theory that extreme cold at high altitude might have stopped the clockwork supposed to ignite the rockets, Van Allen heated cans of orange juice, snuggled them into the third Rockoon's gondola, and wrapped the whole business in insulation. The rocket fired...
...desperation at the age of 14. Nine years ago, he quit Switzerland in disgust ("They're suffocating in security and drowning in comfort"), settled in a lean-to shack in Paris' scruffy Impasse Ronsin. There, in a litter of old iron, cooky crumbs and whirling clockwork, Tinguely constructs his "abstractions," erratically watched over by his wife Eva. Says her husband: "She paints the kind of things Edgar Allan Poe would have, if he'd been able to paint. See the type...