Word: shaft
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when he touched bottom he was farther down than the Eiffel Tower is up. Three other spelunkers followed him. They established a camp in the big vault, perhaps 900 feet long, half as wide, and 300 feet high. They explored the even deeper caverns that sloped away from the shaft. They threw yellow-green dye into a rushing underground river to test their theory that this was the same river which surged out of the ground three miles away. (It was.) They looked for new forms of subterranean life, such as the cockroaches they found last year, almost white...
Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser made a chilling discovery 30 minutes before he was scheduled to pilot one of his speedboats in the Lake Tahoe Gold Cup race. Someone had sawed half through the two-inch propeller shaft of one of his Gold Cup racers, and had stuffed nuts, bolts and rags into the carburetor and blower. Another had been thoroughly doused with gasoline. It was, said Kaiser, "an attempt at plain, cold murder." But he climbed into a third boat in his fleet, buzzed off to a second place behind Shipping Heir Stanley Dollar...
...stepped Striker Paul Gruber, a hefty (6 ft. 2 in., 240 Ib.) farmer from Utzenstorf. He carried a murderous loft. Stecken, a whippy hickory shaft with a heavy cylindrical head. Eyeing the small (diameter 2½ in.) hard-rubber disk perched on an elaborate tee made of two upcurving steel rails,* Gruber took aim, lowered his stick twice, then drove with all his might. The Hornuss buzzed off into...
...Little Davey") Lewis, 83, onetime Pennsylvania coal miner who served 14 years as U.S. Congressman from western Maryland, helped found (in 1912) the nation's parcel post system; in Cumberland, Md. When he was nearly nine, Lewis shouldered a miniature pick & shovel, followed his father down a mine shaft to earn $10 a month. He was 17 before he learned to write, was once pulled out of a mine cave-in, half dead, with a physics book in his pocket. In 1910 Lewis was elected to Congress, identified himself as a left-wing Democrat. In 1935 he wrote...
Into a spherical cavity 18 ft. in diameter, carved deep in solid sandstone, the engineers packed 320,000 pounds of TNT, cast in close-fitting blocks. Then the shaft was blocked with material as solid as the living rock. Instruments and test structures, dug in for miles around, waited for the rock shock. When the charge exploded, the earth rose up in a mound, as if a giant fist had poked up through mud. Jets of flame burst through the debris. Jagged boulders soared through the air; good-sized chunks of rock landed a mile away, and smaller fragments covered...