Word: walls
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...approach, inspired by a famous case in medical annals. Forty years earlier, a Chicago iceman, suicidally depressed by the loss of his voice after a laryngectomy, had plunged an ice pick into his throat. Instead of dying, he regained the ability to speak; he had accidentally pierced the esophagus wall in a way that gave him a voice again...
...duplicate that miracle, Staffieri made a small slit in the esophagus of a laryngectomy patient. Then he flapped part of the esophageal wall over the top of the trachea, forming a valve linking windpipe and pharynx. To speak, the patient simply placed a finger over the external breathing hole in the neck. Exhaled from the lungs, air was forced through the internal esophageal slit, allowing the pharynx to vibrate and create sounds. But the valve could open only when air from the lungs forced it open. When food or liquid came down the esophagus, the valve remained closed...
They had seen him go to the wall financially to make a movie, The Alamo, in which he tried to propagate political beliefs. They had seen him fight off what he called "the big C" (cancer) once before, in 1964, returning to work on a rugged location months before he should have because he hated being an invalid. In more recent years, they saw him posed proudly with one or another of his grandchildren (he married three times and had seven children). They saw that even though one could no longer live the life of a mythic Western hero...
Brock persisted. He assembled skeptical experts in February, hung on his wall the Detroit News cartoon showing him as a heavenly messenger hovering with tire and spark plug and saying, "Don't just stand there! Invent something!" And the realities of oil began to change minds. Hundreds of engineers and scientists gathered and debated the prospects. They made out a report that went to the White House, concluding that major breakthroughs in engines, fuels and structures were possible...
...blister into arrogance. In his clockwork Cabinet meetings, he thinks nothing of cutting off the first digression with a knifing "That's not pertinent!" He once complained about Ludwig Erhard, who succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor, that "talking with him is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall...