Word: tinning
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Working for the Compania Minera de Oruro in the tin-mining camp of Colquiri, one early morning in 1948, tin miners led by Juan Lechin invaded our homes and took us to union headquarters with shouts of "Que mueren los gringos...
...Juan Lechin, now Vice President, used these tactics a long time ago; and having armed tin miners on his side is a grave threat to the Bolivian government, which has tried hard to run the mines economically...
...vital to vehicles in far-out space suffer from some far-out troubles. Cosmic radiation sickens their semiconductors. Vibrations and swift temperature changes cause fractures in all-important wires. Lubricants evaporate into the vacuum of space. But scientists are already working on some far-out cures. The latest: a tin-magnesium-aluminum alloy that can be made into wires that grow gap-bridging "whiskers" when broken and soon heal their own wounds...
Scientists are not sure what makes tin whiskers grow. They are slender crystals that seem to squirt out of the metal like toothpaste out of a tube. They grow fastest at 125° F., which is close to the temperature inside a home hi-fi set, but they grow well enough at average room temperature (70°), which is common in enclosed parts of spacecraft. Now a spacecraft with a faltering voice or an electronic brain that has become psychotic need not be given up for lost. Allowed a few days to grow, the little tin whiskers will make...
Thus ended ten days of imprisonment in the dingy tin miners' union hall at Siglo, Veinte, 135 miles from the Bolivian capital of La Paz. Until the end, there was no certainty that the men - pawns in a power struggle between Bolivia's moderate President Victor Paz Estenssoro and its leftist Vice President Juan Lechin - would get out alive. Even after Lechin backed down, many of the rebellious miners whom he leads seemed in a mood to set off a civil war in the bleak Andean nation. They demanded that Lechin appear personally before them to explain...