Word: pile
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Squash Court Pile. Production of plutonium was probably no more important, but vastly more dramatic. On a squash court under the stands of University of Chicago's football field, a strange apparatus took form. It was an oblate spheroid (doorknob shape), built up of graphite bricks with lumps of uranium or uranium oxide imbedded in their corners. This was the world's first chain reaction "pile"-a uranium "lattice" and a graphite "moderator." If it worked according to Dr. Fermi's theories, it would produce the first chain reaction ever set up on earth...
...caught and hanged. His 19-year-old sister lost her mind at the news. For the next 25 years, until her death, she called at the bank daily to inquire for her brother. In legend, she became the "bank nun." Until 1924, the bank occupied a low, fortress-like pile dominating London's City, was known as The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. (Despite its ponderous look, a workman once found his way from the street through building cracks and into the bullion room.) It withstood the bombs of the Luftwaffe...
Community Bricks. In the center of Berlin, within a circle about five miles across, the destruction is what the army calls complete. Here the buildings are only shells or piles of brick and mortar dust. Yet even here it is only the buildings that are destroyed-not the materials of the buildings. Much of the brick and stone, including the marble walls of the Reichs Chancellery, can be used again. A sign on a brick pile says: "These bricks are the property of the city of Berlin. Persons taking them away will be punished." The bullet-clipped trees...
...Mother Hubbard. OPA magnanimously dropped rationing of about 6,000 new 1942 cars still in the nation's stock pile, scarcely enough to meet one day's prewar demand. Many dealers, to avoid argument, simply went right on selling cars only to holders of top priorities. OPA also announced that, when the new cars roll off production lines, they will be rationed at first to the same eight classes of essential drivers who previously got stockpile cars...
...pulled out a watch he had brought home for his father, a palm-sized pistol he had taken from the Mayor of Mannheim, a .38 automatic* he had taken from a German, a flashlight he had picked up. in Hitler's house at Berchtesgaden and a pile of dirty clothes, which he dumped in a corner...