Word: longingly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Pounding south one night last week, the crack Paris-Toulouse night express sped toward sleeping Chateauroux. Outside of town, with braked wheels flaming, the express smashed into two freight cars and curled up in a heap of tortured junk, from which trapped passengers screamed for help until long after dawn...
French Poet-Playwright Jean ("Bird-catcher") Cocteau has long been an opium smoker, makes no apology for his vice, once wrote a book about it, regards it as an interesting part of the most interesting personality he knows. When the French police, who had always looked the other way, arrested France's Public Opium Smoker No.1 on charges of opium smoking last summer, wealthy French Elégants suspected that M. Cocteau had got in the habit of giving it to his friends among the poor-sailors, waiters, etc., on whom the authorities, for fear they might turn...
...late great Albert Abraham Michelson, in his final experiments, reflected light back & forth ten times in a mile-long vacuum tube from the faces of a rapidly spinning, 3 2-sided mirror. Velocity measurements completed by his successors after Michelson's death yielded an average figure of 186,270.75 miles per second. But in individual runs there were unexplained, periodic variations up to twelve miles a second. At first this caused excitement over possibility that the speed of light might not be constant (TIME, Dec. 25, 1933). The clamor was quieted by attributing the variations to "experimental error...
...principle is that of cutting a light beam up into a certain number of sections per second, then measuring the length of one section. This is like clocking a freight train when you know the length of the cars. If the cars are 30 feet long and you see that two of them pass a given point every second, you know the speed is 60 feet per second...
...also developed at Harvard, which alternately brightens and dims the beam 19,200,000 times a second. This is like nicking at regular but very close intervals a cable which is rapidly being paid off a drum. The light beam is split. One part is conducted over a long course (185 yd.), the other over a short course (about 2 yd.). Both are reflected back to a photoelectric cell. On the beam which has been over the long course the brightness peaks (nicks) lag somewhat behind those on the other. From the amount of this lag the length...