Word: foams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such popularity is indeed deserved: syndets do the job better. They dissolve the greasiest grease and dirtiest dirt, leave no scum behind, make clothes cleaner and cutlery more coruscating. But the result of all this cleanliness is a mountain of foam. Most of it is created by the high-sudsing detergents used for household work or washing dishes in the sink. Such detergents sometimes cause foam to back up stories high in the pipes of tall apartment buildings. A high-sudsing syndet falling through a pipe from the 15th floor may enlarge itself 17,000 times by the time...
...foam is not only gushing out of bathroom drains and kitchen sinks; it is also pouring out of faucets. In many suburban areas, such as New York's Suf folk County, a glass of water from the tap is likely to have a detergent head on it like a schooner of beer. The city dweller does not suffer nearly so much from syn dets in his water, but he probably does most to contribute to the syndet problem...
...Foam from sewerage syndets sometimes piles up five feet high on rivers, and volcanoes of it belch and billow over the aeration tanks of sewage-disposal plants, to be windborne for blocks, blighting vegetation and stinging eyes...
...syndet remains active long after it goes down the drain, bubbling on and on through rivers and lakes and often seeping through the earth from septic tanks to well water (where its foamy presence may be a valuable warning that sewage is seeping in too). European waterways also foam with detergent suds, and German bargemen on the Neckar have complained that 3-ft. fleeces of the stuff are a menace to navigation...
Assembling an Octopus. Moore, who bosses his expanding empire from a foam-rubber bus seat ("It's the best desk chair I've found") in Continental's Dallas head quarters, started out at 18 as a ticket agent in the Little Rock bus depot. In those days the U.S. bus business consisted largely of a patchwork of local companies that seldom traveled more than a few towns down the road. Recalls Moore: "In my first year a man wanted to buy a ticket to Dallas. I told him he couldn't get there...