Word: pendulums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...right speed. If they vibrate too fast or too slow, an electronic device retunes the transmitter and makes the waves vibrate at the exact frequency that is absorbed most strongly. Thus the waves, regulated by the ammonia molecules as the escapement of a clock is regulated by its pendulum, keep to a steady beat. Hitched to a "frequency divider," they measure time accurately in ordinary minutes and seconds...
...present occasion provides the new administration with a unique opportunity. The Wagner Act came to be regarded by management as one-sided. The Taft-Hartley act was vindicative toward labor. The pendulum has swung widely. Now is the time for a moderate and constructive approach, one which would formulate the legal framework of collective bargaining on a new basis...
Roughly, the theory goes like this: regardless of issues and men, ever since the Revolution a pendulum has swung back and fourth, carrying the American people now into a liberal era, now into a conservative era; it is, to change the metaphor, a spiral movement going from a "period of change" into a "period of stabilization" and on into a new period of change, and so on; and--note this--each of these periods lasts, with one or two exceptions, from 12 to 16 years. Now I'm not saying that Schlesinger would feel he had to get up there...
...subject, but they could not agree. Repeatedly Washington begged Congress to pass a standardization law; in 1795 he suggested that the U.S. adopt the new French metric system. Jefferson thought he had a better idea: he wanted a system based on the length of a uniform cylindrical pendulum which, at 45° N. latitude, would move at the rate of one beat a second. Congress did not go for that, either...
London's famed Sadler's Wells company was putting on a new ballet. The orchestra struck up Haydn's cheerful "Clock" Symphony. Onstage, the audience saw a twelve-foot grandfather clock with human hands and a swinging pendulum of dancers' legs. But to go with Haydn's rippling music, Choreographer Leonide Massine had scraped up a trivial love story between an insect princess and a human clockmaker, and set it dancing with steps that were largely borrowings from a dozen Massine ballets. About all that made the evening enjoyable, particularly...