Word: shaft
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fritz Winter left his job as a miner in a Westphalian coal shaft when he won a scholarship at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis clamped down, Winter scraped together enough money to buy a hillside farmhouse in Bavaria. As a front, he set up shop as a maker of wooden knickknacks. His real work he did at night, painting abstractions that reflected the grimness of the times. Says Winter of one typical painting, which shows four heavy, black hammer forms relentlessly assaulting a doomed crystalline structure: "I was a seismograph; I was under a heavy weight in those years...
...next few days, as a ground crew worked its way to the scene, the searchers located the bodies of the other four. The land party reached the riverbank at week's end, found that four had died of spear wounds-and one of machete slashes. Around the shaft of one spear were wrapped a few pages torn from a Bible. The dead were identified, then buried where they lay. Ecuador's government sent sympathy and regrets to the U.S. ambassador, but regarded any attempt to find the Auca murderers as impractical. Back in Milwaukee, McCully's father...
...bribing officials to gain their loot. Astonishment should spring, rather, from the discovery that mining assays should have any bearing on timbering rights at all. The linkage of timbering and mineral rights dates to the nineteenth century, when lumber was worth little, yet was essential for construction of mine shafts. Today the timber above ground is often more valuable that the minerals beneath, so a mining company may sell lumber at great prices and never dig a shaft...
...dead body, they did not acquire its spirit; with that insight, as myths tell it, the original oneness of spirit and body, heaven and hell, was torn asunder. The ancient Egyptians spent half their lives preparing for the afterlife (some lucky corpses were sent to eternity in a glass shaft carved to represent the phallus of Osiris); at times it seemed as if only the grave robbers, who returned a large percentage of buried wealth to circulation, saved the nation from bankruptcy. The Macedonians did things more simply (Alexander the Great was transported to his burial in honey...
...Franz, who built Nazi Germany's (and the world's) first mass-produced jet engine, the new turbine works on the "free power" principle. The conventional turboprop engine drives both the propeller and machinery used to compress air for combustion; hence, no matter what throttle setting, the shaft must always be kept turning fast enough to keep the compressors working. In Franz's turbine, the two functions are independent; one turbine drives the propeller, a second powers the compressors, lowering fuel consumption and increasing the plane's speed. First aircraft slated...