Word: sound
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...retreat like scattering minnows. Fifty-eight feet below, in the control room of the submarine, men stood their watches in the eerie green glow of instrument lights. The prison silence was broken only by the whir of a generator, the purr of a hydraulic pump, the leaky-faucet sound of water trickling down the packing gland of the periscope barrel. The sub broke water, the bridge hatch swung open, the skipper and his lookouts scrambled topside. There they began the countdown required before launching a 1,000-mile Regulus-type missile. The sub rocked quietly, like a metronome. After precisely...
Lost in an Echo. The captious sea is at once Admiral Jimmy Thach's ally and enemy. Sound, his chief means of detection, travels almost five times faster through water than through air, and it plays more tricks than a Soviet delegate at a peace conference. "The ocean," says Thach, "is a liquid jungle. Survival depends on how well we know this environment and whether, like Tarzan, we can tell the friendly sounds from the unfriendly ones-the monkeys from the tigers...
Thach and his men, and the civilian scientists working on ASW problems, hunt this jungle with sonar and radar equipment that has grown in sophistication over the years but is still far from perfect. Heavy seas, hammering the hull of a destroyer, can override the sonar-transmitted sounds of distant submarine screws or reduction gears. The sun heats the thin layer of air over smooth water, and this in turn can bend radar waves. Sometimes a thermal layer, 100 to 300 feet deep, distorts sound-and a knowledgeable sub skipper plays this layer like a shield. He can confound enemy...
...Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer; United Artists). Throw together a couple of unknown film writers, an original screenplay never tested in bookstalls, on television or on the stage, a budget of less than $1,000,000 to cover the cost of old-fashioned black-and-white photography and monophonic sound, and what bubbles up? For Producer-Director Stanley Kramer, at 44 one of the most skillful chefs in the business, the result of putting such ingredients together is savory cinema, free of froth and sharply seasoned...
...cheerful idiocy throughout most of the book. Probably inevitably, a calm is reached toward the end, when Mame doing her old turns in outlandish new costumes no longer seems very funny. Particularly in a long, unnecessarily moralistic chapter on Mame among the anti-Semites, Around the World begins to sound like The Long Voyage Home...