Word: smoothly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ordinary window glass is made by drawing a wide ribbon of glass vertically from a reservoir of syrupy melted glass. It cools in the air and has a brilliant "fire finish." But the process of drawing produces stresses that make flaws and irregularities. To make the glass smooth enough for mirrors, auto windshields and store windows, manufacturers are forced to an elaborate process of grinding and polishing glass sheets on both surfaces. The plate glass made in this way is expensive, and its surface lacks fire brilliance...
...million; No. 4 was known as "the peseta stealer." No. 5, Gerardo ("The Butcher") Machado (1925-33), coupled graft with terror, rode in a $30,000 armored car, had some of his victims fed to the sharks. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dispatched suave Diplomat Sumner Welles to smooth the way for the unseating of the "President of a thousand murders." Welles began a subtle campaign against Machado inside the army itself, and one afternoon Battalion No. 1 of the Cabana Fortress trained its guns on the yellow-domed palace, whereupon Machado cried: "All right, my boys, I'm through...
Deep space, far from stars or planets, is like the pond's smooth surface. An object becalmed in its emptiness floats like a galleon in the doldrums. If the object is a spaceship with propulsive power, it can cruise in any direction, meeting practically no resistance. But it must keep away from the whirlpools: the gravitational fields that surround stars and planets. If it plunges into one of them, it may end as a puff of gas in a star or a brief streak of fire in a planet's atmosphere...
...million miles. To cover these great distances, it takes more time (146 days to Venus, 260 days to Mars), but only slightly more speed than is needed to go to the moon, which is only 230,000 miles away. This is because space between the planets is comparatively smooth. It is only slightly affected by planetary gravitation, and the great pull of the sun is countered by the orbital speed that a spaceship inherits from its home planet...
...Erosion. The newest and most radical moon theory was developed by British Cosmologist Thomas Gold, now at Harvard. Professor Gold agrees that the moon was pockmarked long ago by large meteors, and it may have been built up entirely by such accretion. But he does not think that the smooth, dark areas that are called maria (seas), because early astronomers thought they were exactly that, are filled with lava. He thinks that they are low places full of fine dust that was removed by a kind of erosion from the moon's highlands. In some places...