Word: western
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most people believe that Western genius, for better or for worse, created the humming miracles of modern technology and science. But Moscow tells its children that that is just capitalist propaganda: Mother Russia really did it all. On "Radio Day" last week, Communications Industry Minister Gennady Vasilievich Alexenko patiently repeated that the man who first developed radio (in the year 1895) was Alexander Popov of St. Petersburg. (Popov had thought up radar, too.) And what of the world's acclaim for Italian Inventor Guglielmo Marconi? Said Moscow: "Sham laurels...
Moscow has recently debunked other Western delusions of grandeur. The steam engine, it seems, was not invented by Britain's James Watt, but by Ivan Polzunov. Thomas Edison gets false credit for the light bulb; Alexander Lodygin thought it up first. The first airplane was not constructed by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but by a Russian naval officer, Alexander Mozhaisky. The first jet plane was designed by Nikolai Kibalchich, a terrorist, while he awaited execution, in 1881, for his part in the assassination of Czar Alexander II. It was Vyacheslav Manassein who discovered penicillin, 75 years ahead of Britain...
Almost a year to the day after taking over, La Motte T. Cohu last week abruptly bailed out of his seat as president of Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc. All the explanation T.W.A.'s stockholders got before he took to the silk was a statement that he had "completed the job" of putting the company back on a straight course...
...Naughty Sun. In the backwater districts which Henry administered, servants took the place of the "water supply, sanitation, metalled roads, mechanical transport and shops of Western communities." Though "relatively humble" people, Henry and Annette lived and traveled with as many as 39 servants (senior officials carried a train of more than 100). They raised four children in a swampy wasteland teeming with wild pigs, buffalo, cobras, scorpions, fleas, flies and ("most abundantly") leeches. Fever and dysentery were everyday matters-trifles compared with the cholera which, by slow degrees, killed their beautiful youngest child...
...vigor and energy, he is rooted in the life of the people about whom he writes and knows exactly what he is talking about; and, most important of all, he is steadfastly honest. Roger Lemelin may yet write novels that will make not only French Canada but the entire western world acknowledge him as an important writer...