Word: sahara
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...nose at the Patent Office. Garabed T. K. Giragossian went directly to Congress and enthralled Congressmen for seven years (1917-24) with stories of how the Garabed Free Energy Generator would save the U.S. a $30,000,000,000 annual power bill, win the War, redeem the Sahara, rescue Mankind from the curse of the steam engine, crime and insanity. Mr. Giragossian asked for a special Act of Congress to protect his discovery-"not a perpetual motion machine"-and got such an act (1917). President Wilson vetoed the bill, Congress again took up the matter. This time the Senate Committee...
...with the change of seasons. Through rifts in the cloud veil, he discerns great blue-black patches which by spectroscopic analysis he finds, with croaks of envy, to be oceans of water. Heavily wooded areas look dark to him and he has difficulty distinguishing them from the oceans. The Sahara and Arabian Deserts look fairly bright, the clouds three times brighter still. In the African spring he sees the Nile valley turn dark with new vegetation. But unless his instrument is considerably more powerful than telescopes on Earth, he can see of man's handiwork not a trace...
...Some 45,000 square miles of French Sahara (exactly the size of the State of Pennsylvania) to round out the 40,000 square miles quietly obtained from Britain last year by Benito Mussolini...
...There is little pleasure for a conquering hero to find his homeland turned into a half-Sahara. But even passing through the dull, dun, desiccated lands, he was a hero, for after him came RAIN. Within a few hours of his passing, showers followed along his route through Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota. Within three days the heat broke and rain fell, heavy rain, prolonged rain?from Colorado to Kentucky?sopping the dust, promising to save the remnant of this season's crops...
...Punishment? The Press carried practically no reports of drought conditions in the Dakotas because the Dakotas no longer had any crops to lose. Yet one of the most talked of articles of the day concerned this new U. S. Sahara and appeared last fortnight in the Saturday Evening Post. Not sensational, it was a piece of excellent reporting by Morris Markey. He began: ''This is written from a small town in South Dakota. ... It has not rained in this town for eleven months. . . . In every direction the fields go off to the horizon, brown and full of dust...