Word: seam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pittsburgh in the 20th Century was a noisy, grimy giant sprawled across a coal seam, gobbling up ore from Mesabi and spewing out molten steel. It squatted, black and ugly, on the hills between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, trailing mill towns up & down its river valleys. It dug the coal and fed it into fiery furnaces, and strewed the mountainous offal of its furnaces across its landscape...
...scorned seam of Tory tradition, Britain's National Coal Board proudly mined itself a coat of arms. Henceforth all the board's letters and documents will bear a twin row of black triangles (representing coal), flanked by British lions, each shouldering a sun (heat & light...
...TIME'S February 14 issue (see cut) that made him itch to get to a telephone. The story was a brief account (sent in by a TIME correspondent) of the fact that a Birmingham, Ala. housewife had apparently invented a sewing machine needle that would unrip a seam in the same time that it took to sew it. If true, the Abraham & Straus-man said later, "this needle was what an eraser is to a pencil...
...Power Co.'s Gorgas mine, 55 miles northwest of Birmingham. (A small-scale test at the same site two years ago gave promising but inconclusive results.) A thermite bomb was exploded 160 ft. below the surface, at the bottom of a borehole at the south end of the seam. Running northward through the coal for 1,200 ft. were two parallel entries (tapped by additional boreholes every 300 ft.) through which air could be driven under pressure...
...Birmingham, Ala., was pretty quick with a sewing machine. But like other housewives, she found it slow going when she had to rip what she had sewn. With Merritt L. Walls, a gadget-minded ex-G.I, Mrs. Lawrence worked out the first needle that will quickly rip a seam by "unlocking" the bobbin stitch. When the Lawrence-Walls "ripper" was first demonstrated a month ago, Birmingham housewives bought 5,000 (at $1 each) in four hours. Last week the inventors granted exclusive manufacturing rights to the Oilman Corp. of Janesville, Wis., a subsidiary of Parker...