Word: philpot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Codner, with his knowledge of the classics, who thought of the wooden horse and convinced two others-Navigator Eric Williams and Squadron Leader Oliver Philpot-that it would work. For four torturous months, the three took turns in a sandy, almost airless pit in the center of the camp exercise ground, clawing, inch by inch, a tunnel toward freedom. Above them stood a homemade, hollow vaulting horse. Fellow prisoners dutifully toted it to the open ground every day (with one or two of the diggers inside), and vaulted over it in pretended gymnastics while the human moles worked beneath them...
Back in England, Eric Williams learned the news of his friend's death. "He was quite the bravest, the most gifted and the most unassuming man I've ever met." Said Philpot, the third wooden-horseman: "It's appalling, but it's the way you might have expected...
From the moment he arrived in the U.S. from New Malden, Surrey two years ago, a 42-year-old Briton named William George Philpot began wondering what he could do about an American trait that bothered him. At every traffic light someone behind him honked a horn. Five weeks ago in Detroit, Philpot ordered a metal sign. He bolted it to the rear of his car and set forth. The honking stopped. Last week, as a final test, he drove through clangorous Manhattan. Even there, the sign worked. Philpot sighed with relief, and set out in his self-made zone...
Instead of exposing himself to deadly snakes to test the serum, Philpot bought rattlesnake and moccasin venom in powdered form. Then he went to work on mice. He found that a mouse could be injected with 2½ to 3½ times the lethal dose of viper venom, and still survive if promptly given an injection of king snake serum. Better yet, he found that his king snake extract was three to four times more effective than a commercial preparation made, by a far more difficult process, from the blood of venom-injected horses...
...Philpot, now 27 and beginning an internship at Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, and Dr. Smith reported the findings in the current Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. They did not expect the work to found a major business in snakebite cures: the U.S. has only about 2,000 cases of snake bite a year. But there seemed to be no reason why men, as well as mice, should not benefit from the king snake's natural immunity...