Word: xiii
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Sweating It Out. As Discoverer XIII roared off Vandenberg's launching pad last week, it looked exactly like its predecessors. But one important modification had been made. Speculating that previous re-entry failures had been caused by malfunction of tiny rockets designed to stabilize the satellite in orbit-by causing it to spin like a bullet-Lockheed Aircraft Corp. engineers had replaced the rockets with gas jets, anxiously prayed they had guessed right. In the console-banked control room at Sunnyvale, Calif., Air Force Colonel Charles G. ("Moose") Mathison paced the floor while monitoring the countdown and alerting...
...Discoverer XIII serenely circled the earth, a control station some 300 miles below, in Kodiak, Alaska, took charge. On the satellite's 17th orbit, up to it came an electronic command: Release the instrument capsule. The order triggered a complex, irrevocable sequence of 22 events which permitted no margin for error. Jets first swept the 1,800-lb. satellite's nose downward until it pointed to earth at a 60° angle. Pins kicked loose, freeing the 349-lb. instrument capsule for its descent to earth, and the newly installed gas jets immediately set it spinning...
KING LOUIS XIII of France, a man of impeccable taste, insisted on having in his own bedroom the work of only one artist: he rightly considered Georges de La Tour, of Luneville in Lorraine, one of the great geniuses of his time...
Through a combination of pressure and promises, France lured him back to Paris, at least for a while. He was made First Painter to the King, was installed in a splendid house in the Tuileries gardens. But within two years, the intrigues and jealousies of Louis XIII's court had driven him back to Rome. And there, in 1665, "overcome with infirmities of every sort, a foreigner without friends," he died at 71. "They preach patience to me as a remedy for all ills," he wrote in his last, despairing year. "I take it as a medicine that costs...
...Nicotiana tabacum) became known as "the divine herb" and "the princess of plants." But the foes of tobacco spied the devil's hoofs beneath the princess' skirt. King James I of Great Britain called tobacco "the lively image and pattern of hell," slapped on a big import tax. Louis XIII of France and Czar Michael I decreed penalties for smoking, ranging from death to castration, and Pope Urban VIII threatened excommunication for anyone found smoking in church or on church premises. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, attacked tobacco on grounds of health...