Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fact, it is Captain Herndon, not Mark Twain, who is the link to Tommy Thompson, and Thompson who is the main figure of what is so far the summer's best nonfiction adventure story, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (Atlantic Monthly; 507 pages; $27.50). As author Gary Kinder relates, in 1857, some years after making his exploration and writing his book, Herndon had charge of a large paddle-wheel steamer bound from the Panamanian port city of Aspinwall, now known as Colon, to New York City. The S.S. Central America carried 500 passengers, many of them returning...
...boat for the Amazon's mouth. But no boats are headed there, then or later, so young Samuel Clemens is stuck with writing about the Mississippi. There is only the most tenuous and delightful of connections with another kid, in Defiance, Ohio, a century later. This fellow, named Tommy Thompson, is an inspired, perhaps even crazed, tinkerer. He conceives that used frying oil could power engines and rigs a car that actually burns the stuff. He's set for a run across the continent, except that car, driver and passengers drip with sticky oil, and smell like the rear...
...undersea salvager, recovery was a different matter. Herndon's vessel went down 100 miles off the Carolina coast, somewhere in sea at least a mile and a half deep. When Tommy Thompson, by the early 1980s a marine engineer at the elite Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, became interested in undersea mining and salvage, technology for very deep recovery had not progressed much beyond the diving bell. This gadget, first developed in the 17th century, could go deep but do almost no real work...
...answer had produced a 2 1/2 ton submersible "that eventually would grow to six tons, with nine mechanical arms, some having as many as 11 segments," along with video and still cameras, strobes, thrusters, suction picker and collections drawers, all controllable through 8,000 ft. of complex cable. Thompson's driving intellect pushed the technology, and his flatfooted, no-blarney confidence persuaded a consortium of Columbus businessmen to put up very large chunks of money. By the summer of 1987, the submersible was diving in deep water, to a large wooden wreck spotted by the expedition's sonar...
...rent wiseguy that he completed in "Goodfellas." The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The finest American political film ever goes deep and noir into the fear and loathing at the heart of Washington, D.C. The Getaway (1972). Noir cinema reaches its apotheosis with Peckinpah's rendering of Jim Thompson. Throw in the coolest white man ever (Steve McQueen) and you've got a scorcher. Rear Window (1954). Well, actually, the whole Hitchcock canon, actually, but my pick is Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. Down By Law (1986). Jim Jarmusch's extended character study (incorporating a few digs at Hollywood convention) is probably...