Word: wasps
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bazooka Boom. Thus with no fanfare last week, the Ford Motor Co., which made airplane engines in World War II, took on the job of making Pratt & Whitney Wasp Majors for B-36s in Chicago's vast onetime Tucker plant. To boost GR-S synthetic rubber production up to a maximum of 760,000 tons a year, Goodyear and Goodrich rubber companies were asked by RFC to reopen the last two idle rubber plants. And where quick action has been needed, U.S. industry has jumped to the job. Example: to fill the U.S. Army's need...
Special Delivery. In West Orange, N.J., Postman Daniel Fineran, stung by a wasp while delivering the morning mail, asked a housewife for first aid, was bitten...
Rentschler promptly assembled his production team: M.I.T.-trained George Mead, Designer Andy Willgoos, who could "think with his fingertips," and Aeronautical Engineer Don Brown. In nine months, they perfected the 415-h.p. air-cooled "Wasp." It weighed only 650 Ibs., was the most powerful engine for its weight ever built. The Navy was so awed by the engine's test performance it ordered the first Wasp placed on exhibition in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, where it remains today. It has never flown...
These and many more absorbing details of the arachnids' life are contained in a new book, The Spider, published in England, by John Crompton (author of The Hunting Wasp). Crompton, who describes himself as a layman writing for laymen, writes vividly and with vast enthusiasm. At various times he has been a mounted policeman in Rhodesia, a shipping-firm employee in China, an R.A.F. pilot, a novelist, a beekeeper. He has read-and liberally quotes-the experts, including the great Frenchman J. H. Fabre (TIME, Aug. 22) and several Americans. But his book is larded with personal observations...
...Wasp Waists. Searching for a prop that could be used efficiently above 450 m.p.h., Hamilton's engineers, led by Chief Aero-dynamicist George Rosen, tried all sorts of shapes. One design, intended to sidestep shock waves, had curved blades, quite like the swept-back wings of a fast modern fighter. Another had a blade with a pinched-in "waist." Some blades were short and broad so that they could spin rapidly without nearing sonic speed. All these designs proved unsatisfactory...