Word: paraboloid
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...mirror of Pyrex glass. The disk was 74 in. across, a foot thick. After cooling for three months, it was shipped across the Atlantic to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons & Co., spent a year and a half making a polished concave surface true to the ideal paraboloid curve within two-millionths of an inch. Then it traveled back to the new observatory, where it was laboriously removed from its elaborate packing case, coated with silver, mersed into place at the bottom of the 3O-ft. telescope tube...
...done. Preparations consisted of building at Akron the largest airship factory and dock in the world. Its floor is a vast concrete spread of 364,000 square feet (more than 8 acres), the largest single uninterrupted floor area yet built. Over this is the dock structure, a cavernous semi-paraboloid building 211 ft. high, 1,175 ft. long. From the high perspective of a flying machine it looks like a peanut or silkworm cocoon. Although the dock was not entirely covered last week, 40,000 people could congregate under the finished portion to watch the ceremony of fastening the first...