Word: sputnik
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...technological revolutions. Said he: "Don't worry about what makes the grass green or why fried potatoes turn brown." Wilson was a hardware man, and he could see little sense in projects that did not have an obvious military value. Even in 1957, when Russia entered space with Sputnik I, Charlie Wilson was scornful. "Why worry?" he asked. "It isn't going to fall down and hit you on the head, you know...
...clothespin manufacturer, Begle graduated from the University of Michigan ('36), took his doctorate at Princeton in topology (thesis title: "Locally Connected Spaces and Generalized Manifolds"), began teaching at Yale in 1942. As secretary of the American Mathematical Society, Begle was in a key spot when Sputnik-stirred mathematicians began to worry about U.S. high schools. They were shocked at "cook book" courses stuffed with unrelated rules, appalled at teachers who themselves hated math. With grants ($4,000,000 so far) from the National Science Foundation, Begle organized top mathematicians and teaching experts into five teams, each covering a year...
...Because of Willis, teachers can look forward to a maximum salary of $10,000 as against $5,700 when he arrived. The student-teacher ratio has dropped from 39 to 33. Almost everything that U.S. educators hail as new and different is quietly under way in Chicago. Long before Sputnik, Willis began beefing up his curriculum, launched programs for gifted students. He got $500,000 from the Ford Foundation to start junior college TV courses, another $468,500 to tackle the school dropout problem. He has abolished grades-by-age in several elementary schools; this summer...
Hams boast of far more historic achievements than playing cuddly over the air waves. They have made notable contributions to the radio arts; their experimentation and enthusiasm, for example, has led to widespread use of single sideband radio. In 1957, ham operators helped track Russia's Sputnik when U.S. scientists were caught without an effective radio tracking setup. In the Congo crisis last summer, a Leopoldville ham picked up a message from a remote part of the Congo that said: "We need help; five women, eight children, four men cut off for days. Two women raped." Within hours, Belgian...
Ever since Sputnik I. the Russians have been ostentatiously flexing their missiles in an artful campaign to persuade the West that in the rocket age, warplanes are not worth a ruble-or a U.S. defense dollar. "Airplanes," sneered Nikita Khrushchev, "belong in museums." But last week at Moscow's Tushino airport, as the Soviet Air Force staged its first public flypast in three years, it was clear that Soviet aviation designers have been working overtime all the while. More than 100,000 spectators, including Khrushchev, squinted into the bright sunny sky as one new plane after another whooshed into...