Word: filamentous
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...back, the first silver needle pricked the skin of my instep. The sensation was so slight it was as though I had brushed a filament of stereo speaker wire or touched the tip of a thorn. The needle was so fine and flexible that if not in the hands of an expert, it would have bent when meeting my skin rather than sticking. The next sets of needles went into my wrist, chest, abdomen and lower neck. I had been a pin cushion for 20 minutes before he at last applied his needles to the area I needed treated...
Candles and kerosene lamps flickered that Sunday night as the lab assistant connected two wires leading from the bottom of a glass bulb to a set of storage batteries. The piece of carbonized cotton sewing thread inside the bulb suddenly lighted up. In dozens of earlier experiments, the filament had blazed a few minutes before breaking, but this time it continued to glow. Forty hours later the bulb was still alight, and Thomas Alva Edison boasted to his staff: "If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred." Man had entered...
There were technical differences between the bulbs that, Edison's partisans say, made his superior. For example, Swan's carbon rod was fairly thick, Edison's filament was thin. But a crucial difference was that Swan stopped with inventing the bulb, while Edison took what would now be called a "systems approach"; he saw that the bulb had to be only one of a whole series of inventions. To make it in the first place, he and his assistants had to produce a more complete vacuum than had ever been known before. Then they had to devise...
...biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce chain reactions of valor that even the biles could not drown. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver star twinkling somewhere inside...
...link between this world of phys ical prowess and Delaunay's abstract disc-paintings was light. The filament bulb was just beginning to transform the appearance of Paris, and artificial light fascinated Delaunay. His earlier paintings, done under the influence of Seurat and the pointillists, contained sun discs rendered in thick dabs of pure color. A recurrent image in the poetry of the pre war avantgarde, especially in Apollinaire's, was of a world revived, bathed, transformed by natural and artificial light. That was the essential subject of Delaunay's disc-paintings. An eye used...