Word: uranium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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First the hardy prospectors came to parched and desolate Western Australia for gold in the 1850s. Then began a century of boom and bust that brought successive waves of fortune hunters seeking silver, tin, lead and later uranium and bauxite. But the find with the richest potential of all was iron...
...from operating an oil well. As long as a well produces, the depletion write-off continues, even if the original cost of exploration and drilling has been recaptured 19 times over-as typically occurs. Other treasures from the earth and seas rate lesser but equally arbitrary allowances: 23% for uranium, 15% for copper, silver and gold, 10% for coal, 5% for oysters, clams and clay for flower pots. The theory is reasonable: extraction depletes natural resources. But oilmen lately have made enormous discoveries in Alaska and elsewhere; the U.S. has enough proven oil reserves to last for 20 years...
Last Friday was hot. And Mildred, my secretary, was late to work. The dictaphone kept sticking and played anything it recorded back to me backward. "Nathan Sincerely," Sirs Dear:" Not to mention the far east, the gold and uranium rushes, the stabbing by nail of the nine year old boy, and the discovery of a living Neanderthal in the Massachusetts mental hospital "I'm joking of course. I've got it all backwards. The Neanderthal wasn't Neanderthal at all, he was just a brilliant guy. And besides that he didn't live long. He killed himself by swallowing...
...decades of pioneering work in radioactivity with Chemist Otto Hahn at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Lise, a Jew, was forced to flee to Sweden-just when she and Hahn were on the verge of achieving nuclear fission. When Hahn sent her the details of his experiments with uranium some months later, she completed the immensely complex mathematical calculations proving that he had indeed split the atom and, in the process, released a fantastic 200 million electron volts of energy...
...there was Louis Slotin, a morose Canadian with an apparent death wish, who conducted tests of critical assemblies by poking curved segments of uranium or plutonium together with a screwdriver while eying his Geiger counter and neutron monitor. One day in 1946, nudging segments of a Bikini test bomb a little too close, he suddenly saw a blue ionization glow in the room-the sign of a dangerously radioactive reaction. He threw his body over the segments until everyone else in the room could hurry out. Although the others lived, Slotin achieved his death wish. He died in agony nine...