Word: ovale
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Using a side door to dodge the press, Navy Secretary John Sullivan stomped into President Harry Truman's oval study one day last week. For 15 angry minutes he criticized his new boss, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and the abrupt cancellation of the Navy's 65,000-ton supercarrier (TIME, May 2). Then he laid down a bitter letter of resignation and headed for the door...
...time John F. Kopczynski graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology ten years ago, he was thinking seriously about wheels. Why, he asked himself, should they always be round? Maybe oval wheels would do some jobs better. Last week, Kopczynski (now 31 and president of Buffalo's Pivot Punch and Die Corp.) displayed a set of something he calls "Walk Wheels." They are oval in shape and can flip-flop through mud or sand that would founder conventional round wheels...
...oval wheels are hitched together in pairs, two of them replacing each drive wheel of a vehicle. Between their hubs is a longitudinal bar. The real axle is pivoted on the bar's center. The wheels are geared together in such a way that one of them is always on end when the other is on its side. As the wheels revolve, the bar moves like a seesaw. Its center, carrying the axle, does not move up or down, so the vehicle can ride as smoothly as if it had round wheels...
Obvious advantage of the oval wheels: they do not spin themselves into the mud, as round wheels do. They are "geared to the mud": the pointed ends dig into it while the flat sides, whose curvature is like that of a much larger round wheel, support the weight of the vehicle. Inventor Kopczynski says his experimental unit has about twice as much pulling power as if its wheels were round...
...soon as the "all in" was sounded in his weekly press conference, President Truman made an announcement that was a surprise to none of the 158 newsmen gathered in the White House Oval Room. Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, who wanted to get back to his North Carolina law practice, had resigned (that is, Royall's third letter of resignation had been accepted). Who would get the job? The President couldn't say. Would there be other changes in the top defense command? Harry Truman said he didn't expect any major ones. But, he hedged...