Word: purely
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Applied to India, that meant to Gandhi that people could not be pure in thought, word and deed unless they were their own masters. So he began to work for Indian independence. He found India's "struggle" for independence in the hands of a few well-educated Indians. The Indian National Congress,* was a polite debating society, pledged to win dominion status for India by "legitimate" means. Gandhi converted it into a mass movement. Indian peasants did not worry about independence until Gandhi told them...
...deep-sea divers working on the sunken British submarine Thetis were a scientific problem to famed Biologist J.B.S. Haldane. One day, early in World War II, Briton Haldane impetuously clapped on an oxygen mask and, breathing pure oxygen (to study its effects), "dived" in a pressure chamber to a depth of seven atmospheric pressures (200 feet). The experiment nearly killed the experimenter, but it proved to him that oxygen, under pressure, is a violent poison...
...British Navy launched a full-dress study of oxygen poisoning, now reported in the British Medical Journal. Oxygen is essential to life, but it appears that the human body can stand just so much of it (not so much as biologists once supposed). The British Navy concludes that breathing pure oxygen under more than two atmospheres of pressure (or an oxygen dive of more than 25 feet under sea water) is dangerous...
Nervous Knockout. Deep-sea divers generally have been fed pure oxygen and helium, pumped to a pressure matching the depth of their dive. Divers sometimes unaccountably passed out during relatively shallow dives (up to four atmospheres of pressure used to be considered safe). The British study, involving some 2,000 tests, proved that oxygen, forced into the tissues under pressure, somehow intoxicates the central nervous system and poisons the brain cortex. (Whales, biologists have observed, bypass the whole oxygen problem by collapsing their lungs during deep dives...
...dose for nearly 2½ hours another day. For some unknown reason, people are more vulnerable to oxygen poisoning under water than under the same pressure in a pressure chamber. And at a pressure of one atmosphere or less (as in high-altitude flight), human beings apparently can breathe pure oxygen indefinitely without harm...