Word: puffins
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...lurched down the runway at De Havilland's Airfield in Hatfield, England, until it reached almost 20 m.p.h. Then the pilot pulled back on his handlebar control, and the plane glided all of 8 ft. into the air. Sweating profusely, 39-year-old John Wimpenny quit pedaling, and Puffin-so named because of all the puffing it took to get it in the air-wafted back to earth...
Thin Skin. Last week not only Puffin's puffers, but two other teams of British aeronauts as well, were attempting to accomplish what Leonardo da Vinci had failed to do nearly 450 years ago: build and fly an aircraft powered only by man. The payoff is tempting: a $14,000 prize donated by London Industrialist Henry Kremer, 55. The rules of the contest are deceptively simple. All a citizen of the Commonwealth has to do is fly a heavier-than-air craft over a figure-eight course, around two turning points not less than half a mile apart. According...
That was the year that the then Lord of Lundy, Martin Coles Harman, who had bought the island for $80,000, was ignominiously charged by Britain with violating the Coinage Act. In 1929 he had begun issuing his own stamps, his own puffin and half-puffin coins, and putting his own face on the front of the coins instead of that of George V. After the trial Harman was forced to withdraw his puffins and to have British stamps on Lundy mail along with his own. But the puffins remain profitable tourist items, and neither Martin Harman...
...when the cruel sea calms and the weather mellows, the population of Lundy swells from seven to 80 or so. Then the bluebottles flock to the island by the thousands to marvel at the ice-age cabbage that now grows nowhere else, or to catch a glimpse of a puffin, an auk, a rare peregrine falcon, or any other of the 145 kinds of birds found on Lundy. But as much as anything else, the bluebottles seem to come to spend a little time-and a few puffins-in a place with no taxes, no license laws, no schools...
Died. Dr. Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, 61, popular philosopher, author (The Book of Joad, The Testament of Joad and 46 other serious-to-potboiling books), University of London professor; of cancer; in London. Puffin-shaped, goat-bearded and brilliantly voluble ("I can explain anything to anybody"), C. E. M. Joad was variously a socialist, pacifist, patriot, agnostic, advocate of free love, polygamy, euthanasia, suicide and easy divorce, and a professional carper. On scientific progress: "The superman made the plane, but the ape has got hold of it." On religion: "Why, if God so loves us, does He give us such...