Word: pistone
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Auto engineers who dream of finding a replacement for the complicated, churning piston engine have long looked wistfully at the gas-turbine engine that introduced the jet age. The turbine-with its screeching siren noise, high fuel consumption, slow acceleration and searing exhaust gases-now dominates the jet field, but is still far out when it comes to autos. After 14 years of experimenting and several premature publicity outbursts on the subject, Chrysler Corp. is now confident that it has tamed the gas turbine...
Kerosene & Peanut Oil. Auto men were first attracted to the gas turbine by its simple construction (one-fifth the number of parts in a piston engine) and the fact that it could deliver high power while using almost any fuel that will burn in a test tube-from kerosene to peanut oil. Its basic works are uncomplicated. It sucks air through an intake and compresses it in a chamber into which fuel is sprayed and ignited by a spark plug (see diagram). The expanding gases drive one turbine wheel that spins the air compressor and then rush on to whirl...
...years, electronics has leaped from the vacuum tube to the transistor to the maser and laser. In less than a generation, aircraft engineering has jumped from piston to jet to rocket and next to nuclear propulsion. So fast is all technology moving these days that by one estimate new engineering graduates can expect a professional "half life" of only about ten years. Half of what they now know will be obsolete in 1973, and only half of what they will need to know is available to them at this time...
...Boston Symphony, which not only played superbly under its new conductor, Erich Leinsdorf (see below), but included in its program what proved to be the week's most distinguished première-Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto, with John Browning as soloist, Composers Copland, Walter Piston and William Bergsma had also provided opening-week pieces, all of them competent occasional music (Copland's brassy, sinewy Connotations for Orchestra, Piston's stately Lincoln Center Festival Overture, Bergsma's festive In Celebration: Toccata for the Sixth Day). But of the four new works, Barber's seemed...
...orchestra: a week before he had to lead the Boston through Samuel Barber's intricate new Piano Concerto (see above), he had not received a complete score, a hazard he dismissed as being part of "musical tradition." Just before leading the orchestra in Philharmonic Hall, Leinsdorf conducted Walter Piston's Symphony No. 7 in Boston, rehearsing it for the first time purely from memory. Said an astounded Piston: "I wasn't prepared for a man to know my score better than...