Word: magic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Although the magic laws of Newton pointed clearly into the sky, no one apparently followed their lead until a shy, deaf, self-educated Russian schoolteacher, got to thinking about air travel in the 1890s. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, wrote about space flight with amazing prescience. He chose the rocket as the only possible space engine and derived mathematically the speed that its exhaust gases would have to attain. He decided that it should burn liquid fuel. This conclusion he published in 1898, when not even an airplane had left the ground...
Interpreting an equally great dramatist and poet requires someone equally good at acting and speaking words. It is Shakespeare the magician with language who bulks largest in the recital, and Gielgud has his own touch of magic, not from any magnificence of voice or roll of theatrical thunder, but from a projection of feeling, a rush of psychological light. Moving from Youth through Manhood to Old Age, he plays many parts. Few will complain that he includes a host of warhorses-Hamlet's best soliloquies, Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, an abdicating Richard II, a sleepless Henry...
...phenobarbital. The Sleep describes how Baby takes a brief waddle down Broadway, stumbles half-comatose into an automobile, weaves back home unscathed, and collapses into the miseries of natural sleep (he dreams that a fat gypsy squaw castrates him with a silver-bladed bread knife). Finally, he swallows the magic "pheeny" that returns him to the blissful, dreamless condition of "some giant foetus...
...film is based on The Crucible, Arthur Miller's angry drama of moral ideas and political implications, which ran for almost six months on Broadway in 1953. Unhappily, Playwright Miller tried to reason his demons out of existence with intellectual argument rather than exorcising them with literary magic and dramatic spells. As a result, a play that held an image for the ages became no more than a vigorous tract for the times...
Innovate & Profit. For the businessman with something truly different, new buying patterns promise fabulous profits. The sales magic in planned obsolescence has worn thin; consumers are increasingly wary of "new" models whose only visible changes are reshuffled buttons and knobs, especially if the old models still work. Today's consumer demands something really different, and in 1958, industry responded by spending $10 billion on research and development in the hope of creating a benign circle of economic activity: the exciting demand for new products creates employment, which in turn results in more money for more workers to buy still...