Word: waxing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...child will be puzzled by Dr. Thorndike's definition of a candle: A stick of tallow or wax with a wick in it, burned to give light. Long ago, before there was gas or electric light, people burned candles...
...letters from every Tom, Dick & Harry who finds a hunk of rotten fish anywhere along the Atlantic Coast." Last big U. S. find of "ambergris" was by poverty-stricken residents of Bolinas Beach, Calif. (TIME, March 19). Their treasure proved valueless. So do most of the substances-usually soap, wax, paint, tallow, mud, wood, coke, clinkers, decayed fish-with which wild-eyed people rush to chemical laboratories to learn whether they have found the sperm whale secretion which is used as a base for expensive perfumes. No such delusion had small, apple-cheeked Roderick Palmer Crandall when he found...
...Angeles boasted that its museum would have "the largest assemblage of wax likenesses of celebrities ever assembled." This was an exuberant exaggeration. More remarkable was the fact that all the figures, half a hundred of them, are the work of a single encausticist, industrious, 23-year-old Katherine Stuberg, of Los Angeles. Encausticist Stuberg comes by her talent naturally. For three generations her family has modeled the hairless heads of statesmen, patriots, murderers and heroes in clay, cast them in wax, fitted them with wigs, glass eyes and mustaches, painstakingly tinted them to the life. Reporters visiting Miss Stuberg...
First time the question was asked Alpha caused Inventor May no end of embarrassment by croaking: "The Raleigh Observer-Times" Blaming the lapse upon the damp weather, Professor May quickly dictated a new wax cylinder, had Alpha repeat over and over in a cockney bass: "I read the News & Observer." But flushed tobacco farmers were not impressed, paid more quarters to see the hootchy-kootchy...
...avoid any suspicion of ventriloquism or of a hidden assistant pushing control buttons, Professor May removed the robot's breast plate, disclosing a mechanism like the interior of an ordinary radio. Publicly he explained that Alpha's repertory of answers consisted of 20 or 30 recordings on wax cylinders, as in oldtime phonographs, which were run off in the control cabinets and reproduced from the loud speaker in the robot's chest. Alpha cannot really understand language, but he can respond to a variety of set questions the answers to which have been prepared in advance...