Word: elba
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Augustin Jean Fresnel lost his job as an engineer with the French government in 1815 because he opposed Napoleon's return from Elba. Then he turned his fertile, inventive brain to the problem of getting lighthouses to give more light. Little recognized in his short (1788-1827) life, Fresnel (pronounced Fray-nell) wrought an optical revolution and indirectly saved untold lives by junking the mirrors on which lighthouses had long depended, instead put the light source inside a cylindrical lens with multiple-refracting bands at top and bottom. The resulting Fresnel lens (commonly pronounced Frez-nel) still has many...
...even more famous palindrome, jokingly attributed to Napoleon: "Able was I ere I saw Elba...
...grief, but it did not work: there was only "an increase in my inescapable dedication to Dylan." With the Welsh ladies' faces set against her like so many druid stones, Caitlin took her five-year-old son Colm and fled into exile, to the Italian island of Elba...
...penguin with his hands." In part, it was a Latin love call that Caitlin could not resist ("those wonderful whirlpools of dankly greasy, black grass hair, that it was an insult to the Creator not to fondle"). Caitlin recalls every turn of their sometimes amusing, often pathetic affair. Elba proved as strait-laced as Laugharne, Wales, and the time came when the hissed words "Prostituta, prostituta" sounded in her ears...
...jokes, the first number in the directory is that of a Mr. A A, who probably has the tersest handle in the Commonwealth. His phone, located at the premises, 30 Huntington Ave., is KEnmore 6-4642. The last number in the book, belonging to Mr. Carma Zzyzzway, of 18 Elba (not far from the Mediterranean Sea) is ASpnwl 7-4970. We hope they'll be hearing from...