Word: compassing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With a load of nitrate, the Ada Rehan turned into the Atlantic, circled around blindly for a while until Captain Harold B. Ellis discovered which sailor was carrying the magnet around in his pocket and throwing the compass off. Just outside of Tripoli they steamed through a floating minefield under the impression that it was a gathering of turtles. Captain Ellis went ashore with a nervous breakdown, refused to come back...
Senator Claghorn, the unreconstructed Southerner who refuses to use a compass because it points north, can now take his constitutional in the deepest woods. General Electric has a new compass which points east and west. The needle is made of silmanal-a new alloy of silver, manganese and aluminum-which can be magnetized across its width instead of lengthwise, as standard compass needles must...
Thus, by comparing the time of readings, three stations can make sure they all heard the same bomb. Each also records the compass direction from which the sound came. In a matter of 40 minutes the readings can be compared, plotted on a chart. The spot where the three bearing lines intersect is the spot where the bomb was dropped. The Navy says it can plot the bomb explosion accurately within one mile at distances up to 2,000 miles from the shore stations...
Author Jenney gives all credit for her 124-page collaboration to Poet Shelley, who has also supplied the foreword ("Whenever I have tried to compass the thought of mankind as possessing relevance to the eternal spheres, it has become clearly evident to me that the Earthman was choiring his way. . . . The prisms of chance do not allow too great an opportunity for merit or renown; they revoke the essential, and persuade mankind into linear aspects such as the ulterior powers descry for illusive dedications."). More surprising is a second foreword by William Ewart Gladstone, disembodied but still magisterial...
...most devout Democrats regretfully observed that after six months in office and two months of peace, Harry Truman was doing little better than muddling through. Bouncy Maury Maverick, the Texas ex-Congressman now in charge of WPB's Smaller War Plants Corp., bought himself a dime-store compass and cracked: "There are so many times when I don't know in which direction I'm going that I have to take it out and look...