Word: sanding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Four years ago Hassi Messaoud was simply an abandoned water hole, a navigational reference point for voyagers across the vast sea of sand and stone that the Romans called leonum arida nutrix- the arid nurse of lions. Today it has 5,000 inhabitants, sprawls over nearly 60 square miles of desert. Hassi Messaoud still has no women, no children, no church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade...
...even the French Community's half of the Sahara is awesome in size (1,600,000 sq. mi. v. 213,000 for France) and bewildering in its diversity. Barely a seventh of it is the movie desert of The Sheik-the vast expanses of sand wind-blown into golden dunes. The rest is mostly rock: gravelly plains, dry river beds, lunar landscapes whose peaks soar to 11,000 feet above sea level and depressions of 50 to 100 feet below sea level...
France took on this unpromising territory largely by happenstance. When Britain in 1890 agreed to concede France a free hand in the Sahara, Lord Salisbury commented: "Let the Gallic cock sharpen his spurs in the desert sand." But for nearly half a century virtually the only Frenchmen to show much interest in the desert sands were adventurers and eccentrics. Tindouf, now one of the French army's most important Sahara outposts, was not occupied until 1934, and the last of the marauding desert bands was not brought under control until...
...drilling teams labored in 120° to 130° temperatures and through sandstorms, often came off an eight-hour shift near collapse. At Edjelé, welders putting together oil storage tanks learned that simply to touch the metal of the tanks meant a bad burn. The combination of Saharan sand and heat wears out mechanical equipment with startling rapidity; at Edjelé the average life of a Dodge truck engine is 7,500 miles...
What has enabled Price to transform the prefab is intensive automation of his factories. IBM machines control quality and monitor shipments. Nailing machines pound nails into interior and exterior sections with a single bang, and machines automatically cut, sand and paint every section. Overhead cranes move parts down a long assembly line, hoist them onto one of Price's fleet of 476 trucks which take on a house every seven minutes...