Word: rivet
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While I was walking down by the rivet yesterday I saw something which gave me an idea I think your readers might be interested in. Of course I don't know much about Harvard or Cambridge yet, but it seems to me that this scheme would be pretty impressive if it could be carried through...
Skyscraper. The steel riveter-the man who builds the hanging gardens of the U. S.-is herein made the subject of jest. One riveter drops a red hot rivet down the seat of another riveter's pants. Both are rivals for the hand of a chorus girl. The successful riveter (William Boyd) swings through the air on a chain, from his work to a theatre roof, in order to embrace the girl...
...racquets are piled at the side of the court. Breaking one, a player grabs another, finishes the point. Sometimes in a hard game a champion breaks five or six racquets in succession. They cost fourteen dollars apiece. Court tennis players hold their racquets toward the middle, near where the rivet would be on a tennis racquet. Jay Gould was famous for his "Railroad service" which climbs along the penthouse, dropping almost dead. Etchebaster has a service like Gould...
...building of skyscrapers there are a few details in which science has not supplanted skill. Workmen still play catch with incandescent rivets, which, when heated, are tossed through the air 30, 40, 50 feet to where a nonchalant figure, swaying on a matchstick girder, swings a pail to catch them. Loiterers many floors below stand enchanted, watching the bits of glowing metal leap obligingly like miraculously agile trout into a waiting pan. Loiterers reflect that while science sometimes fails when heavy steel bars drop down, skill is infallible, for no rivet ever falls...
Last week, on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, skill failed. A rivet leaped through the air, gave a convulsive trout-like twist, dodged the waiting pail, slipped down through the air, gleaming, white hot, toward a Fifth Avenue bus-top. It struck with a hiss upon the back of a silk dress being worn by Helen Frawley, 17. Loiterers watched her being put into a taxicab, rubbed their eyes, gasped, moved away...