Word: thickness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Chicago's 16-story Monadnock Building, built in 1891, required masonry 15 ft. thick at the base to support the crushing load. Such walls were made unnecessary by the so-called "curtain wall," hung from the building's frame. But since World War II, the architects' slang for a building's outer covering, "skin," has become especially appropriate; thin, lightweight metals and glass have turned more and more office buildings into glistening, icy slabs of graph-paper monotony. What Frank Lloyd Wright called "those flat-chested facades" has become a national vice...
...does the information from these sources always filter through the thick complexity of daily life. One evening a friend and I were sitting on the porch of our boarding house chatting with one of the neighbors. After reminiscing about her first husband, whom she married in 1915, and asking us whether the sinking of the Titanic preceded World War I or II, she wanted to know whether we thought there would be another war. We muttered and rambled for a while, until she asked us: "Who is it that's so strong now? Germany...
...dispenser shot 18 rapidly spinning disks. The disks were only 0.7 in. thick and 4.5 in. in diameter, but each was made of 22 million copper wires one-third as thick as a human hair. The wires were stuck together with naphthalene, the familiar material of mothballs. As the disks spun in space, the naphthalene slowly vaporized, releasing a cloud of wires that spread into a sausage shape, then into a long cylinder curving around the earth, 2,000 miles above its surface...
Lincoln Lab scientists watched the cloud by radar and saw it grow longer and longer as the thin wires separated. In about two months the wires should be evenly distributed around the earth, occupying a belt five miles wide and 25 miles thick...
...command was sent to the satellite, activating its dispensing mechanism. Within a day, 50 pounds of copper wire were strewn in a large cloud about the dispenser. As time passes, this cloud will disperse evenly to form a orbiting belt of "needles" roughly five miles wide and 25 miles thick. At present the belt is about 11,500 miles long, and is spreading around the globe at the rate of 1000 miles...