Word: coal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Alfred bought coal and ore mines in Germany and Spain, built power, gas and water plants and his own fleet of ships. Above the smoke and soot of the Ruhrgebiet, overlooking his busy factories, he built Villa Hiigel, a monstrous, boxlike pile made of stone and steel because Alfred feared fire. There he entertained the royalty and dignitaries who streamed to Essen to pay tribute to his genius. When he died in 1887, the Kaiser sent a special deputy, and messages of condolence poured in from all over the world...
...commercial possibilities of Gilsonite was Samuel H. Gilson, a U.S. deputy marshal in Utah and part-time prospector. One day in the 1880s while prospecting in eastern Utah's Uintah Basin, he found a crumbly, shiny, black substance which he mistook for a new form of coal. But when he tried to burn it, it melted. It was one of the world's largest known deposits of a natural pitch substance similar to what Noah supposedly used to caulk...
...Evans' nephew, Charles Stickler, as president, Manu-Mine had cozily acted as the commission's consultant, contractor (without competitive bidding) and official inspector of its own work, received an "exorbitant" $7,000,000 (of the total $19.5 million in contracts) for drilling useless holes to fill abandoned coal mines with sand and gravel along the turnpike's right of way. Prosperous little Manu-Mine's big profit: over...
...elder Diefenbaker tutored young John, kept him reading nightly by the light of a coal-oil lamp. According to a family legend, John looked up one night from a biography of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Liberal Prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911, and announced in a firm voice: "I'm going to be Premier of Canada." His mother smiled; John's studies went ahead as though high office were indeed the aim. He never even learned to milk...
...harvesting a fortune when the infant Congress decided to redeem such "trash." Yankee Trader Dexter's finest feats included selling 42,000 warming pans and cargoes of mittens to the warm West Indies and, on the solemn advice of a practical joker, shipping a large quantity of coal to Newcastle. The warming pans were used as ladles in a sugarmaking factory and for frying fish; the mittens were snapped up by another trader and rushed to the Baltic. Dexter's coal reached Newcastle in the middle of a coal strike; his profits were "enormous." Most memorable, however...