Word: prisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...scarab of Egypt (Atauchus sacer), for example, Fabre discovered, possesses the instinctive gift of making a perfect sphere of dung for its food and a perfect pear for its larva, even as the bee is born with the gift of making a hexagonal prism...
Universe in Flight. Astronomers have a speedometer to clock the motions of skittish heavenly bodies. They take spectrographs: photographs of the body's light spread out by a prism into a band of colors. If the band is "shifted toward the red" (i.e., if it is redder than normal), it shows that the body is moving away from the earth...
This difference allows astronomers to photograph the brighter parts of the sun's atmosphere with a "spectroheliograph," a prism spectroscope which casts sunlight of only one color on a photographic plate. The light from the solar atmosphere, glowing in that color, shows in the picture. Most of the dazzling light from the surface, being of other colors, is excluded by the spectroscope...
...happily cast in Carleton C. Brower, whose languid voice and expressive features lent excellent emphasis to Wilde's epigrams; while Cathleen O'Conor was exquisitely amusing as the sharp-tongued, lofty Lady Bracknell. Other notable performances were John Jay Hughes' harried Worthing, Elaine Limpert's highly decorous Miss Prism, and Seabury Quinn's limp and sanctimonious Canon Chasuble. Anna A. Prince, Jr. was, despite a certain tendency toward overplaying, a charming and decorative Gwendolen, while Jane D. Philbin as Cecily was sufficiently wide-eyed and innocent...
...roof prism is used in a gun sight's elbow telescope, which enables an anti-aircraft gunner, for example, to look horizontally into the eyepiece and see his target overhead. The elbow telescope inverts the image; the roof prism's function is to turn the image right side up. Roof prisms are thum-sized, polished crystals whose two top facets are shaped like a peaked roof. In manufacture, a piece of glass is first sawed roughly to shape, then ground to exact proportions by a delicate hand. In the final product, every facet must be absolutely flat...