Word: powerful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Conventional gasoline engines have a basic fault; their reciprocating parts (pistons, connecting rods, etc.) must be stopped and started thousands of times per minute. This wastes power, and it also calls for a heavy engine to stand up against the battering it gets. Last week NSU Werke motor company of Neckar-sulm, West Germany described a gas engine that has neither pistons nor valves. Invented by a mechanical genius named Felix Wankel, it was developed with financial help from Curtiss-Wright Corp., which provided a fervid earlier announcement of it (TIME, Dec. 7) but no mechanical details...
...cavity, still small but growing, passes the intake port leading to the carburetor, it draws in fuel and air. Then the cavity decreases in volume, compressing the mixture. The engine's single spark plug fires; the exploding gas pushes the rotor and shaft. At the end of the power stroke, a corner of the rotor uncovers the exhaust port, and the burned gases are swept out of the engine. Meanwhile, two other cavities have been formed and are passing through the same cycle. Maximum shaft speed is 17,000 r.p.m., but the rotor turns over only one-third...
...that altitude. Then he nosed up at an ideal 47°. At 40,000 ft. he dumped his cabin pressure, and his pressure suit inflated. His afterburner went out at 75,000 ft. He shut off his air-starved engine at 95,000 ft. The ship coasted up without power and porpoised over at 103,395 ft., beating the Russian record (94,658 ft.) by more than the 3% required by the F.A.I, to certify a new record...
...Australians got the first substantial electric power from their giant Snowy River hydroelectric project, an endeavor so vast that its $1 billion price tag is equal to 20% of the entire national product of ten years ago. Another signal of change: an upsurge in immigration has brought 1,500,000 hard-working "New Australians," mostly from Europe, to back the "Old Australians" in a forced-draft development of their U.S.-sized continent...
...debates of 1959 that is bound to continue on into the 19605 is the economic competition between the U.S. and Soviet Russia. In the statistical numbers game, the experts point in alarm to the fact that Russia has grown to rank as the world's second greatest economic power in the space of 30 years. They cite a Russian annual-growth rate twice as fast as that of the U.S., a Russian gross national product that is around 45% of the U.S. figure, with estimates that the Reds will reach 55% within ten years. The bald figures are impressive...