Word: ferrie
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Space Toboggan. Professor of Aerodynamics Antonio Ferri of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn is a skip man. He believes that a hypervelocity missile should spend only a short time in the heat-generating atmosphere, then soar up to peaceful space to cool off. Ferri's missile designed to follow this skip course (a "damped phugoid" in aerodynamic fancy-talk) is something like a V-nosed toboggan with curled up edges. The bottom and the outer sides of the curls are covered with heat-resisting ceramic, and the "controlled environment space" for a bomb or a crew to ride...
Both Eggers and Ferri point out that their glide or skip missiles are also promising as vehicles for bringing a human crew back alive from a satellite orbit or a trip to the moon. But it is safe to guess that the enormous amount of money and effort already expended on hypervelocity flight would not be made available without a military motive. There is some slim chance of countering a crude ballistic missile that can follow only a predictable course to a single target. But a hypervelocity missile that moves about as fast and can change its course...
...Schnabel, among others), and when his travels took him to Italy in the '30s, he tried to carry out his grandfather's wish. The famous piano was there, all right. It had been built around 1800 in Turin by piano-makers named Marchisio and a woodcarver named Ferri. Decades later, the city council of Siena had presented it to Crown Prince Umberto (later King Umberto I) as a wedding present. It seemed within Carmi's reach at last, but Italy's Fascist bureaucrats never gave him permission to enter the royal palace...
Rome's art scholars greeted Ferri's announcement with deep skepticism. "Every painter," snorted Expert Lionello Venturi, "shows something of his own appearance in his paintings...
...Answered Ferri: "They are slow to accept new ideas here in Rome. Leonardo himself had difficulty. He was put to work on machinery instead of painting...