Word: countdowns
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Sailing Orders. The countdown that will put Polaris on station in the '60s began in 1955. In a broad survey of U.S. military strength for President Eisenhower, a blue-ribbon committee chaired by (then) Massachusetts Institute of Technology President James R. Killian Jr. recommended the construction of a fleet ballistic missile to be fired from a submarine. It was a suggestion that set up as complex a problem as ever faced the combined talents of U.S. science and technology. It called for a missile that could live in water, the earth's atmosphere, space and the re-entry...
...Folio he found the word Bacon ("I have a gammon of Bacon"), which, counting downward, proved to be the 371st spoken word on the page ("I then divided that number, 371, by 53, the number of the page, and the quotient was seven!"). According to the Donnelly lucky-seven countdown, it turned out that Bacon wrote not only Shakespeare, but all of Marlowe, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne's Essays. The Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford boom was drummed up in 1920 by a Gateshead schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney, a proper foil...
...from a vast communications network. Mathison made a final check with radar tracking stations scattered around the earth. All were ready. From Cape Canaveral, Fla. came the word: "RF system ready." At T minus 10 seconds, "Moose" Mathison gave Canaveral the go-ahead: "Ready to launch." Canaveral's countdown neared its end: ". . . eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one-main stage ignited." Mathison hunched forward,. almost as though he were riding with the huge missile. Cried he: "Go, baby...
...frogmen returned to shore, paying out an insulated wire as they went. After a short countdown, an officer pressed a button, sent along the wire an electrical impulse that touched off a small, solid-propellant aircraft rocket in the model's tail. The model rose sedately out of the water, climbed to about 60 ft. and plopped down again. It all looked too easy to be true. Nothing but water was needed to hold the rocket upright, and only water was affected by its blast. Even if the rocket had carried 1,000,000 Ibs. of fuel...
...Five-four-three-two-one." Announcer Hugh Downs did the Canaveral countdown, then launched his rocket: "Here's Jack!" Into public view again loomed Jack Paar, returning to his bereft nighttime audience after his headline-making walkout (TIME, Feb. 22). Home from three weeks in the wise old Orient, he was full of sweetness and contrition. He gave NBC another chance, despite its censorship of the now celebrated W.C. joke, and he admitted that his tantrum had been childish and emotional. "I don't really need enemies," he said, "when I have me." Then he went right after...