Word: germanize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that victory for one or the other could have profound implications for a whole area of technological development. Japan Railways Group (JR), the leader in the Japanese development, uses a design that relies on magnets made with superconductors, the extraordinary materials that carry electrical currents without resistance. The West German model, known as the Transrapid and built by a consortium that includes Thyssen Henschel, Messerschmitt, Bolkow-Blohm and Krauss Maffei, uses conventional electromagnets. The West Germans stopped using superconductors in 1979, convinced that the technology was out of reach. Thus, if the Japanese can get their design into marketable shape...
Another major difference between the two designs is the way the trains levitate. As Manfred Wackers, chief systems analyst for Thyssen's team, puts it, "Our system is attractive. Theirs is repulsive." Meaning: the two systems use opposite ends of the magnet to lift off. In the West German model, winglike flaps extend beneath the train and fold under a T-shaped guideway. Electromagnets in the guideway are activated by a distant control station, their polarity opposite that of electromagnets in the wings. Because of the attraction between the poles, the magnets in the guideway pull on the magnets...
...more certain project for the moment is the Hamburg-Hannover line, which the West German government committed itself to building last June, with operation scheduled for the mid-1990s. The track is planned as the first segment of a 600-mile Kiel-Munich line, but not all systems are go yet. Some politicians and many citizens remain unconvinced that the $1.8 billion needed for the first segment will be money well spent, especially with $1.35 billion already allocated for a high-speed conventional-railway project called the Inter-City Experimental. Transrapid supporters, however, do not think the choice between conventional...
...Orleans is derived from the origins of its inhabitants. The New Orleans Mardi Gras was started by Protestant businessmen. The traditional New Orleans neighborhood guy, sometimes known as a yat -- that character who greets people with "Where y'at?" -- is likely to be of the same Irish or German descent as the Brooklyn dockworker he sometimes sounds like. The person I have known who most naturally fit into the pace of New Orleans -- a person whose normal and astonishingly effective way of keeping appointments was to stroll around the French Quarter, assuming he'd run into the appropriate person...
...jump in the discount rate did give a short-term boost to the dollar. In one day, the value of the greenback jumped from 1.90 West German marks to 1.92, its highest level in 18 months. But by week's end foreign-exchange traders sold dollars and drove the value of the currency back down. They calculated that U.S. trading partners might intervene to prevent the U.S. currency from rising...