Word: bird
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pilot on the Omaha-Cheyenne route, told his messmates: "I saw something on the wing wire. It was a sparrow. It didn't move. I taxied half way across the field. I speeded up. It fell off. The floodlight was on and I could still see it. The bird flew and caught up with me. Well, it landed right on that wire again...
They rejected Southern Cross and sought a more expressive name for the thing which lay at rest on Naselai Beach. It was a boat, for it had come across the water to Fiji, bearing men. But they had never seen a boat which flew in the air like a bird. The inspiration came suddenly. "Waqavuka" (bird-boat) they cried, and their brown hands fluttered about the plane and the four men who stood beside...
Fiji did not give up Waqavuka easily. The bird-boat might not fly until brown eyes had seen the 200-sovereign purse given by the mayor of Suva to help pay the debts of the white men. Brown noses pressed forward to inhale the perfume of garlands and of a floral American flag tenderly woven by little brown children. Brown fingers touched Waqavuka's talisman, the omnipotent Tambua, tooth of the sacred whale...
...fortnight Governor Horace Mann Towner vetoed the act and repeated that cockfighting is "a barbarous and cruel sport." But people said the law would not matter one way or the other. The jibaro pays no attention, saving his breath for the secret pit, the dashing fury of his little bird, the hot argument or epic narrative afterward...
Inventor White, satisfied, took the machine back to his laboratory for further study. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, army aviator and flying instructor, his stern mistress is aerodynamics. Quietly, persistently he has worked to prove his theory that a bicycle, like a bird, can gain forward momentum by upward strokes of wings...