Word: eardrum
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Borman has been air-oriented from youth, when he built model airplanes and sold newspapers to pay for flying lessons. A West Pointer who opted for the Air Force, he earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from Caltech, broke an eardrum during a practice dive-bombing run and for a while was certain that he could never again take to the air-let alone fly to the moon. But when his eardrum healed completely, he resumed flying, and now has a total of more than 5,400 hours of flying time. Between training sessions...
...delicate an instrument is the human ear that at certain frequencies it can discern sound that moves the eardrum a distance only one-tenth the size of a hydrogen atom. The close-up roar of a jet engine amounts to one million billion times this threshhold level; this causes actual pain and soon brings on permanent deafness. Sound vibrations are transmitted by the eardrum and ossicle bones to the inner ear, a bony and membranous structure lined with tiny hairs that connect to the brain's auditory nerve. It is these hairs that are damaged most in noise-induced...
Erupting World. Bazelon says that he is called Bud because "Irwin just isn't me." He used to be an Irwin, though. That was back in the days when he was studying composition at De Paul University in Chicago. Partly because of a punctured eardrum that left him semideaf, he was "shy, diffident, introverted-an exceptionally quiet guy." Six months of study with Composer Paul Hindemith at Yale didn't help matters much; he lost 25 Ibs. and suffered a nervous breakdown. "I couldn't take his Prussian taskmaster tactics," says Bazelon. Bazelon eventually 'fled...
...humor that was vital to their mission's success. Like Schirra, Borman, 37, was air-oriented from youth, building model airplanes and later selling newspapers to pay for flying lessons. He ranked eighth in his graduating class at West Point before he joined the Air Force. Then an eardrum broken during a practice dive-bombing run made him doubt that he would ever fly again. He was delighted when recovery proved him wrong. Lovell, also 37, has been involved in launches since he was 16 and designed a rocket that rose 80 ft. In a term paper at Annapolis...
Banged Ear. In recent years, Tory Leo Amery crossed the floor to slap the face of Laborite George Buchanan; Labor's Emmanuel Shinwell, outraged at a reference to his Polish ancestry, punched Tory Commander Robert Bower (once an amateur boxing champion) and damaged his eardrum. Conservative Ronald McNeil obtained a sort of immortality by throwing a book at Winston Churchill; he missed...