Word: smithsonian
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Last week Dr. Charles Greeley Abbot, head of the Smithsonian Institution and world-famed authority on solar radiation, declared that if William Shakespeare had lived in the 20th Century he would have become an astronomer. One thing Astronomer Shakespeare would have had to get straight from the start is the different classes of nebulae. Astronomers apply nebula not only to whole galaxies of stars far beyond the Milky Way. but also to patches of dark or faintly luminous matter within the Milky Way, which is the home galaxy of earthlings. They may be distinguished by calling the local patches galactic...
...began to be marketed by Remington in 1874. First U. S. patent on a writing-machine, however, was issued in 1829 to a remarkable man named William Austin Burt. On this device, in March 1830, Inventor Burt whacked out the first letter typewritten in the U.S. Last week the Smithsonian Institution proudly announced that it had acquired and would shortly display this message...
William Austin Burt's first typewritten letter, whose orthographic vagaries the Smithsonian charitably ascribes to the weaknesses of the machine as well as to the inventor's weakness in spelling, was written from New York City to his wife in Michigan...
During the year, two honorary staff members and seven active Smithsonian workers died. Mrs. Rachel Turner, charwoman, was retired...
Despite small appropriations, the Smithsonian was enabled by generous outside help, WPA allotments and grants from its own income to send out 20 expeditions, up seven from the preceding year. Some of these trips were very economical. To collect butterflies in Virginia, for example, a scientist requires little besides railroad fare and a net. One or two scientists collected material from the yachts of wealthy kudos-loving sportsmen. Dr. Frank H. H. Roberts Jr. revisited the Folsom deposits, oldest known site of human culture in the U. S. (about 20,000 years old). In Colorado he found...