Word: mother-of-pearl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There were some lean years for the firm in a land that had apparently forgotten all about ships and shipping. Gibbs & Cox designed the world's largest yacht, the Savarona, for the late Mrs. Richard M. Cadwalader, equipped it as ordered with public-address system, mother-of-pearl inlaid bathrooms, gold-plated doorknobs. They also designed the Santa boats for the Grace Line. But not until the U.S. Government decided to embark on a destroyer program did Gibbs & Cox really get under...
...with a morning cup of tea the whole palace shivered with the thud of bombs from low-diving Nazi raiders. A bomb dropping through the glass roof of the private chapel, a converted conservatory, had blasted chunks of masonry out of the wall, demolished the altar, shattered a mother-of-pearl cross. In the midst of the rubble they found Queen Victoria's ornately bound Family Bible. But already removed to safety was the gold altar plate of King Charles I. In the inner quadrangle two more bombs had plowed into the ground...
...more eager to cheer some challenging declaration of faith. But inflexible Mr. Hoover mushmouthed his delivery; the clear, hot words of his finest address got lost (as always) deep in his bulldog chops. He stood there awkwardly, a near-great man whose fate has been to cast his mother-of-pearl words before mobs who, whether friendly or bitter, always yell "Louder!" No honest Republican denied to himself that the convention until now had laid the biggest egg since...
...Japanese in 1937, two hallowed objects were smuggled out of its ancient Forbidden City. About as easy to smuggle as a couple of dentists' chairs, they were an eight-foot, ten-inch white jade Buddhist pagoda (largest jade piece in the world), and a gold, lacquer and mother-of-pearl teakwood Dragon Throne on which Manchu emperors had sat from the 17th Century to the close of their reign. In great secrecy the pagoda and throne, (together valued at $3,000,000) were spirited out of China by coolie cart, mule train, river junk and railroad, across Siberia...
...lenses, such a grating breaks up a beam of mixed light, such as the light from a star, into its component wave lengths-that is, it furnishes, as a prism does, a spectrum of bright and dark lines which identify the fundamental elements of matter. The iridescence of mother-of-pearl is a diffraction effect, caused by numerous tiny grooves in the smooth surface of the shell. The making of diffraction gratings is a high-precision job. It is done with a complicated ruling engine, carrying a diamond point back and forth across the plate...