Word: element
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...erected, not with any notion of permanence, but as a sort of scaffolding to bridge gaps which could not be filled with the instruments and information at hand. Example: splitting the light of distant nebulae in their spectroscopes, astronomers got spectrum lines which they could assign to no known element. Accordingly they created by mutual consent a new element, called it "nebulium," and doubted that it existed. Years later they found "nebulium" to "be their familiar friends oxygen and nitrogen, ionized into unfamiliar atomic states...
...Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1869 the light of the sun's spectacular corona, trapped in spectroscopes during the scant seconds of a total eclipse, has produced on the spectrogram five mysterious bright lines. Astronomers deduced that the corona, though mostly scattered sunlight, was partly self-luminous. What element made it so? Not knowing, they called it "coronium." As recently as last year, in a standard work on eclipses, "coronium" was treated with respect. The Menzel-Boyce report unmasks it as mostly oxygen in bizarre atomic metamorphoses. The normal oxygen atom has eight orbital electrons. Menzel & Boyce proceeded...
...Daniel H. Menzel of the Harvard Observatory and Dr. Joseph C. Boyce of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have at last succeeded in identifying the element responsible for the major part of the sun's coronal radiation, marking the first important step in unravelling a mystery dating from the first observations of the spectra of the corona more than sixty years...
...neutral oxygen atom in the high solar atmosphere and under a peculiar state of excitation has been definitely found to coincide with analysis of three of the strongest coronal lines. For years "coronium" a purely hypothetical element, had been considered the cause of the radiations from the sun's corona, just as the light of nebulae was long attributed to the mythical "nebulium...
...with plenty of material for salty preliminary lines, occupies two acts of their comedy. A fire-eating Virginia cavalryman, a hell-scorched preacher and a bumbling sheriff add to the fun, and Meg (crack-voiced Dennie Moore), a licentious slavey who nevertheless "keeps it patriotic." supplies the really bawdy element of the piece. A typical line of hers, addressed to a horseman to whom she has taken a fancy, ends the play: "Come into the kitchen, captain. I've got something...