Word: pilings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Daniels Pile. Admittedly, the Manhattan District had been over-optimistic in its prediction. When it plunged into the power project two years ago, no one had made more than a start on any of the major technical problems. Skilled scientists and industrial engineers were at a premium. But the Army had a mild, sharp-nosed little chemistry professor named Farrington Daniels, who took on the job of designing a full-sized nuclear reactor to produce power. By mid-1947, Daniels and his team were well into the vast problems confronting them. They reported that the basic difficulties should be solved...
Then the Atomic Energy Commission (which took over from Manhattan District) yanked the foundation from under the Daniels pile. Practical work on a $10-20 million power plant was premature, it said. The wise course was to abandon a frontal assault on the problem and switch to a low-priority program of cautious, long-range experimentation...
...Brooklyn pier one morning last fortnight, a detail of U.S. customs officers quietly moved in on a pile of 600 neat, wooden crates. Customs Inspector Jacob Ehrlich pried into one of the crates with a crowbar. Cried he: "Just as I thought!" His companions pressed closer, saw a gleaming white water closet. They seized the entire $10,500 shipment...
Along China's turgid riverbanks gongs were ringing. Their summons brought villagers running through the wet darkness, crying: "Chiu ming! Chiu ming!" (Save life! Save life!). Pale lightning flickered and thunderclaps split the sky as men, women & children labored with spade, hoe and hands to pile even higher the earthen ramparts of the river dikes. Downriver, other watchmen, gongs in hand, their silhouettes reflected by torchlight, anxiously measured the rising flood crest. Then they, too, beat their booming summons in the night...
Isotopes. The distribution of radioactive isotopes is growing rapidly. By the end of June, U.S. customers got 3,136 shipments of radioisotopes from the Oak Ridge pile. Foreign countries (none behind the Iron Curtain...