Word: thinly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...drives him half out of his wits, her into penitence, both into a cruel psychic deadlock whose detailing is the best thing in the book. Ultimately they stand ready for "the splendid, striving, accomplishing years of middle age," beside which "the years of youth had become a thin, pathetic dream...
...camouflaged at Brest, flew U.S.-built Flying Fortresses manned by the R.A.F. They had arrived through the substratosphere, unheard and unseen in the broad daylight; they had done so because behind each of the Fortresses' four engines were turbo-superchargers, feeding them fat air to breathe in the thin heights. Though the coast below was warm and summery, the planes were frosted over with rime. They cruised serenely above the effective range of ground fire and were on the way home long before German pursuit planes could struggle up to have a go at them...
Thus, literally out of thin air, the turbosupercharger emerged last week as a menace to Hitler's power. It emerged, too, from 22 years of dusty neglect as a belated triumph for its inventor, Dr. Sanford Alexander Moss, 68, who developed the turbo long ago to help beat the Kaiser. As flyers in World War I reached for higher & higher altitudes, they found their engines losing power dangerously. Reason: atmospheric oxygen is as vital an aviation fuel as gasoline. At 20,000 feet, air is only half as dense as at sea level, at 35,000 feet one-fourth...
...This saps the engine's driving power. Whimsical, fox-bearded Dr. Moss had a better idea: to harness energy which would otherwise be wasted-the engine's flaming exhaust gases. Drawing on his youthful attempts to devise a practical gas turbine for General Electric, Moss developed a thin-bladed turbine which the exhaust drove at about 20,000 r.p.m., geared this to a blower which shot compressed air into the carburetors at sea-level pressures...
...with his turbo in 1918, he met the traditional experience of all inventors: the "glassy eye," as he recalls, of skeptical industrialists and Army brass hats. He took them to the top of Pike's Peak, where a 350-h.p. Liberty motor gave only 230 h.p. in the thin air at 14,000 feet. When Moss cut in his supercharger, the motor roared away...