Word: wente
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Year's Day of 1941, the Depression still lingered, and the threat from Hitler was growing. Roosevelt went to his second-floor White House study to draft the address that would launch his unprecedented third term. There was a long silence, uncomfortably long, as his speechwriters waited for him to speak. Then he leaned forward and began dictating...
...unlock the mysteries of the atom: Max Planck launched quantum physics by discovering that atoms emit bursts of radiation in packets. Also the mysteries of the mind: Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams that year. Marconi was preparing to send radio signals across the Atlantic, the Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk to work on their gliders, and an unpromising student named Albert Einstein finally graduated, after some difficulty, from college that year. So much for the boneheaded prediction made the year before by Charles Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office: "Everything that can be invented has been...
...start with medicine. In 1928 the young Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming sloppily left a lab dish growing bacteria on a bench when he went on vacation. It got contaminated with a Penicillium mold spore, and when he returned, he noticed that the mold seemed to stop the growth of the germs. His serendipitous discovery would eventually save more lives than were lost in all the century's wars combined...
...Einstein went on to show that energy and matter were merely different faces of the same thing, their relationship described by the most famous equation in all of physics: energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, E=mc2. Although not exactly a recipe for an atomic bomb, it explained why one was possible. He also helped resolve smaller mysteries, such as why the sky is blue (it has to do with how the molecules of air diffuse sunlight...
...Whether or not [he] had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines ... [His] poem went off like a bomb in a genteel drawing-room, as he intended...