Word: pile
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Death Revealed. Langley Collyer, 61, shy Harlem hermit; of asphyxiation, under a pile of debris ten feet from the spot where the body of his blind brother was discovered 17 days earlier (TIME, April 7); in Manhattan. Death came to the recluse, police decided, when he hit a tripwire to one of the booby traps he kept in his rotting mansion to trap thieves, causing a pile of hoarded junk to fall and smother...
...only schemes proposed thus far have substituted a chain-reacting pile for the furnace of an ordinary powerhouse. The pile's heat will generate steam to run a turbine. But this, thinks Dr. Hutcheson, may be only a better-than-nothing solution, carrying coal-era thinking into the atomic...
...would be far better (and cheaper) to get electricity direct. How? Piles give their energy in a snarl of assorted forms: zig-zagging neutrons, high-speed beta particles, heat, light, gamma rays. Confined within the pile's thick shield, they all simmer down to heat, the most "degraded" form of energy. It takes the costly boiler-turbine-generator combination to "elevate" the heat into usable electricity...
This detour into pre-atomic technology may not always be necessary. Beta rays (streams of electrons) are nothing but high-voltage, direct current electricity. If a pile could be designed to give chiefly beta rays, it would be comparatively easy to coax them into wires...
...still had his chipper spirits. But his Midas touch was gone. In 1936 he turned up in Asbury Park, N.J. as a lunchroom and supermarket owner. He plugged a dandruff cure on the side, operated a bowling alley in Flint. He still talked grandly of making a pile. But it was too late. Last week, in his eight-room apartment in Manhattan, Billy Durant, 85, died. Of the millions he had been "loaned" he left nothing...