Word: leys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that ambitious and ill-fated building project, the Tower of Babel, they have thought up endless projects to improve the universe, and an astonishing number of them have become reality, from the pyramids to Grand Coulee Dam. From those that have not yet come true, popular-science Writer Willy Ley has compiled a new book, Engineers' Dreams (Viking; $3.50). In it, he tells some of the projects modern engineers might accomplish-if they could get rid of political, social and economic...
...Tunnel. Ley leads off with the tunnel under the English Channel. The first proposal (1802) was ahead of its time, but practical. Work began at both ends in about 1880. The English pilot tunnel (6,500 ft. long) had electric lights and hand-drawn cars in which Gladstone, Disraeli and Queen Victoria rode on sightseeing trips. Then the British War Office, aided by the London Times, killed the channel tunnel. England, they warned, would be an island no longer; some enemy might grab the tunnel and pour troops through it. By 1884 the British stopped digging, and nothing has been...
Volcanic Heat. A more colorful project is getting power out of "tamed volcanoes." Ley tells how the Italians have used volcanic steam in Tuscany for more than a century. New Zealand has recently drilled for steam and has already found enough of it to supply power for a city of 200,000 people. In many parts of the world are places where the earth's crust grows hot a few hundred feet below the surface. It would not take much brains or money, Ley thinks, to harness this energy...
Second Nile. Ley does not bother with dams across ordinary rivers; he picks the Congo, .which drains much of Africa's rain forest through a steep-sided valley near its mouth. A dam at this point, says Ley, would form a lake big enough to cover California, Nevada and Oregon. The water would flow northward to fill an even bigger lake (the Chad Sea) in the Sahara, and eventually drain into the Mediterranean. The lakes would presumably improve the climate of much of Africa, and boats would reach the continent's heart through the "second Nile...
...Mirror's publisher, Virgil M. Pink-ley, ex-U.P. general manager for Europe, knew what to do about that. He turned its front page around and set out aggressively to give the Mirror a crisp, sensational style ("All news stories are written too long, including those in the Mirror"). Los Angeles, said Pinkley, "needs a fighting newspaper [and] the Mirror is anyone's fist in a good fight." The paper picked its fights carefully, more often to woo new readers than for any lofty civic motives. Mirrormen breezily campaigned against everything from "black-market baby rackets...