Word: conk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...complex device called a catalytic converter, an afterburner that cleanses exhaust of nearly all carbon monoxides and hydrocarbons. Auto engineers who banked nearly all their antipollution hopes on that device now claim that by 1975 it will still have major defects−including a marked tendency to conk out long before it has endured the legally required 50,000 miles of service. Furthermore, the engineers contend, auto companies have never before introduced such a complicated and bug-prone piece of equipment on every new car in a single year. Any attempt to force them to do so with the catalyst...
...could conk out any minute," says 77-year-old Thinker R. Buckminster Fuller, "and there are a number of people who would like to see this work carried on." To carry on Fuller's work of formulating fresh and sometimes dazzling solutions to the problems of Man on Earth, a nonprofit Design Science Institute has just been set up in Washington, D.C. It will be headed by Dr. Glenn A. Olds, president of Kent State University, with an advisory council including such notables as Polio Fighter Jonas E. Salk, and former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant...
...hour Havasu marathon. Topping 100 m.p.h. on the straightaway and jouncing through treacherous wakes, the streamlined craft are, as Driver Bill Muncey says, "delicate mechanisms that run on the ragged edge of blowing up every minute." Indeed, by the halfway mark in last week's race, crackups and conk-outs claimed 26 of the 94 starters...
...passenger jet bounces us gently in its wake and I shudder. We gas up; off to the southwest we see storm clouds and lightning. Never mind: we're off again. For a moment, I think of those scary instructions picked up back in New York: if both pilots conk out aloft, set the radio dials at 121.5 and ask whoever answers how to land a plane. But then we are past the storm, and 80 minutes later the lights of Los Angeles twinkle into view. After nine days, $60, and only one would-be masher, I've made...