Word: quartz
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...exterior ornamentation of the domed, 180-ft. Temple, a mélange of ancient styles sparkling with tons of white quartz crystals, was newly completed after eleven years' labor. Nine-sided, it stands in a nine-acre park, is supported by nine concrete piers sunk 90 feet below the water level of nearby Lake Michigan...
...diamond cutter sets his whirring wheel, dresses its edge with diamond dust and lubricant as it saws slowly into the big, water-clear crystal on the cutting stand. But the big crystal under the wheel is not a diamond. It is quartz, the most abundant of all minerals but a newly prized jewel of war. Once ground to size, it is the governor of ship, plane and tank communications, an indispensable monitor of the accuracy of range-finding instruments and fire-control devices...
...special ability of quartz crystals to generate an electric current when placed under stress was first observed by Haüy in 1782 and rediscovered in 1880 by Pierre Curie. It is called "piezoelectric effect" (from the Greek piezein: to press; literally, pressure electricity). Conversely, quartz crystals can translate electrical energy into mechanical movement. When an alternating current is fed through a slice of quartz it vibrates at a definite and unchanging frequency. The thinner the slice, the higher the frequency. It is like a tuning fork which sounds the same note no matter how hard or lightly...
...lens grinding firm testified that training in grinding quartz crystals had been reduced from three weeks to three days...
Marianne Moore's poetry is a small museum full of such devotedly matter-of-fact observations. In What Are Years are reindeer, ostriches, paperweights, pangolins, college students, paper nautiluses, quartz-crystal clocks, butterflies, Negroes, France, speech, patch-box inscriptions, triskelions and juniper boughs-a partial list. These things Moore treats not as subject matter but as object matter; and she sees in their essential structure object lessons about the Creation in which man finds himself...