Word: genius
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...thousands of times per minute. This wastes power, and it also calls for a heavy engine to stand up against the battering it gets. Last week NSU Werke motor company of Neckar-sulm, West Germany described a gas engine that has neither pistons nor valves. Invented by a mechanical genius named Felix Wankel, it was developed with financial help from Curtiss-Wright Corp., which provided a fervid earlier announcement of it (TIME, Dec. 7) but no mechanical details...
Spanning the period 1706-34, Volume I only takes Franklin to the age of 28, but these were the spawning years of his genius. He served his apprenticeship as a printer, journeyed to England and back, published the New England Courant, married, formed the "Junto," an intellectual self-improvement club of like-minded Philadelphians, and brought out the first three of the famed Poor Richard's Almanacks. Franklin also set down his basic religious outlook, a kind of deism that made him a logical child of the rationalist Enlightenment. Instinctively a yea-sayer to life, Franklin came very close...
John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, considered eccentricity in a nation's character to be "proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained." Britain has always esteemed such doughty dotties as the 19th century Roman Catholic naturalist, Charles Waterton, who devoted his life to exterminating black rats in England on the ground that they were foreigners smuggled into the country by Hanoverian Protestants. The 1951 Festival of Britain even set aside a section of one pavilion to commemorate oddballs. Britain's contemporary eccentrics manifest more energy than originality, but Britons...
...romantic wreck, and his life a brief, inglorious skidmark to the edge of eternity. According to this picture, he was a great, misunderstood man who was driven to drink by outrageous fortune, but just before his death he experienced a transfiguration in which the heroic drunk and the dissolving genius were transformed and redeemed in a last great love. The notion is so silly that not even the moviemakers could convince themselves it was true. Scarcely a line in Sy (The Big Country) Bartlett's script rings true, and some of them are almost ridiculously false...
...life-size," Whistler once said-and fewer still combine the gall, gallantry and genius with which Whistler fashioned a larger-than-life legend. Poet and Critic Horace (Amy Lowell) Gregory skirts the legend, feeling that many of the stories are in their anecdotage. He sacrifices color for perspective, but even a toned-down Whistler is no still life...