Word: railroads
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BETWEEN CARS, dust flies: Between cars, dust flies, morning early; I hold tightly not to fall, and watch passing towns. Away from Harvard, between cars on Long Island Railroad, too early to get a seat; I watch (through grey dust) passing towns to avoid eyes of heavyset leering businessman who offers me a smoke, a stick of gum, a wink. Too early. Perhaps I should have looked harder for a seat; this area between cars is no-man's-land, and certainly no woman's. Same hazards as walking alone down 42nd St. Mister, mister, leave me alone; today...
...paste potshots began when Mexican Social Psychologist Jose de Jesus Fonseca noticed an American magazine advertisement that he felt insulted the Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata. Over a faded photograph of Zapata, the ad recounted a story of how he threatened to execute any railroad conductor or engineer who thought to keep Zapata's guerrillas from stealing his regulation Elgin watch by wearing a cheaper variety on his wrist. "It's a good thing Zapata's gone," the ad concluded. "He'd be stealing Elgins as fast as we could make them." For $1, a reader...
China's biggest foreign aid project is in East Africa, where it has recently given a $400 million interest-free loan to Tanzania and Zambia for the creation of a 1,166-mi. railroad. The railroad, whose construction is scheduled to start this fall, will transport copper from the interior of Zambia to the Tanzanian coast. China has also pumped $60 million into Tanzania's first five-year plan. It has provided the guerrillas in Southern Tanzania with thousands of tons of arms and ammunition to be used in their forays into white-controlled Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique...
...Helena. Most of his notions were more down to earth. With typical inventor's zeal, he sought to devise easy solutions to practical problems. When he saw his wife laboring over the scrub board, he invented a washing machine. In 1846 he published plans for a Broadway elevated railroad, preceding by two decades the first...
Idea's Beauty. The secret of the swift, silent ride is simple magnetism. Even before World War I, a farsighted French inventor, Emile Bachelet, demonstrated the feasibility of lifting railroad cars slightly off the track and propelling them forward with strong electromagnetic forces. The beauty of Bachelet's idea was that it virtually eliminated rail friction. But the technology of that day was unable to produce sufficient electricity at a low enough cost...