Word: paraboloid
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...brother astronomers straggled back too. The massive telescope frame was completed quickly. At the optical shop, work went more slowly; the incredibly delicate task of polishing the mirror could not be hurried. The mirror had to be a paraboloid (a slightly deeper curve than a hollow sphere), accurate to two-millionths of an inch. Each grinding and polishing was done with fanatical watchfulness. Visitors were asked to remove their shoes, like pious worshipers at the door of a mosque; a single grain of tracked-in sand might scratch up the glass and spoil months of work...
...inch mirror for the mighty telescope at Mt. Palomar was finally pronounced finished. Grinding and polishing began in 1938, was stopped in wartime, and resumed at the end of 1945. Now the big glass disc, yellowish blue and slightly murky like an old Pyrex dish, is a paraboloid perfect within two millionths of an inch...
...gang's all here, Round-headed, pop-eyed little birds blinking at you over the edge of the nest, or pulling a worm two ways, snoring squirrels raising their big square incisors as they inhale and puffing heir paraboloid checks as they exhale. Not to mention an irritated and sleepless chipmunk blanketing himself under the tail of one of the above snorers, or a wide-eyed fieldmouse slamming a hollow tree behind him after skipping over the meadow in nothing flat. Like Dopey, who would always come running over the bridge fifty yards behind his outfit, there is the duckling...
...Cleveland; by Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis to St. Louis; by Chicago, Burlington & Quincy to Kansas City; by Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe to Pasadena, Calif. There in Caltech's laboratories, where a huge grinding machine has been set up, it will spend some three years acquiring the ideal paraboloid curve in its face. Some time before 1940 it will be installed in its telescope on Palomar Mountain in Southern California...
Prizewinner Heffernan, attacking the last assignment, decided that the basic problem about an opera house is how to get out. His design, notably similar to Radio City Music Hall with its paraboloid acoustic ceiling, was so plentifully endowed with exits that any spectator could leave in any direction at any time...