Word: windshield
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...swank Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. one day last week, members of the convening Society of Automotive Engineers traipsed into a darkened room, blinked in the glare of a pair of automobile headlights, then, passing behind a clear glass windshield, observed that although the light beams illuminated the room display, they no longer glared into the observer...
This small miracle was made possible, the engineers were soon told, because the "windshield" through which they looked was made of a recently developed material called Polaroid, and the headlight lenses were backed by plates of the same stuff. Polaroid polarizes light. Reduced to simplest terms, polarization is a process of "combing out" a beam of light so that it vibrates in one plane only. Laymen understand polarization more readily if they imagine that a beam of light, vibrating in all directions, is a flight of straws blown along helter-skelter by the wind. If the straws collide with...
...light beam's "fence" is a crystal, and the gaps which comb light are a crystal's parallel planes of cleavage. Polaroid is a suspension of crystals. The dazzling headlights at last week's demonstration were dimmed because the Polaroid in the lenses and in the windshield was aligned in conflicting directions. The light could thus pass through one but not through both...
...Berkshires in a Chevrolet coupe one bright Sunday morning last month. They had been driving all night, and the three were huddled together in that slouchy "morning after the night before" fashion when suddenly the snooping nose of a new black Ford loomed into the mirror above the windshield. Now all Chevrolet owners know what that meant. It was just like waving a red flag before a bull. The driver's hot sporting blood surged up his spine; he awakened from his spell of dull lethargy and gave the accelerator a little push. "The gap between them widened slightly...
...chauffeur and an architect, recognized Socialist Blum. The insurance agent shook his fist, the chauffeur spat on the glass window from which peered Leon Blum, and the architect set a glass-smashing example with his cane to other Royalists, who soon broke the car's lamps and windshield.* Someone tore off the rear license plate and dashed it through a window at M. Blum, the splintered glass cutting his neck to the jugular vein. Dragging the Socialist Leader out bleeding and gasping, the young Royalists seemed about to do their worst when four Paris policemen shouldered through the throng...