Word: mirror
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...cardboard-soled business executive is very moving. Did he, we wonder, try to touch Miss Young for a taxi fare? . . . If she is aware of the achievements of our nation in industrial output . . . she must surely realize that a tired people . . . could scarcely perform such feats." The Daily Mirror was avuncular: "Miss Young . . . has a kind heart. . . . The contrast between Hollywood opulence and our own modest state may have made the film star ultrasensitive...
This week the greatest telescope is almost ready. It is housed in a softly revolving dome 137 feet in diameter. The telescope weighs 500 tons, but is so exquisitely mounted that an electric motor not much bigger than an orange turns it on its bearings. Its 200-inch parabolic mirror gathers four times as much nebula light as Mount Wilson's 100-inch mirror. Palomar will see twice as far, and it may tell Hubble whether the universe is really exploding-or whether even stranger things are happening...
...telescope frame progressed faster, but both it and the mirror were still unfinished when Pearl Harbor Day scattered the astronomers to those odd, essential posts that scientists fill in wartime. Hubble tried to get back his old job in the infantry, but was made Chief Ballistician at Aberdeen Proving Ground...
...brother astronomers straggled back too. The massive telescope frame was completed quickly. At the optical shop, work went more slowly; the incredibly delicate task of polishing the mirror could not be hurried. The mirror had to be a paraboloid (a slightly deeper curve than a hollow sphere), accurate to two-millionths of an inch. Each grinding and polishing was done with fanatical watchfulness. Visitors were asked to remove their shoes, like pious worshipers at the door of a mosque; a single grain of tracked-in sand might scratch up the glass and spoil months of work...
Thirty-six hundred boys bunked in a wartime bomber plant and commuted to conference sessions in a fleet of 60 buses. The basement of Cleveland's massive Public Auditorium housed 1,600 girls (a minor crisis developed when they found only one mirror to every ten young ladies). Twenty-five Methodist bishops turned out for the occasion, as well as a couple of hundred foreign delegates...