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Education

Newscripts

Lead Balloons Launched at Adl, Big Trucks Are a Specialty, Census Data: Decline in Reading?

by K. M. REESE
July 19, 2004 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 82, Issue 29


 

Lead balloons launched at ADL

The story about Joseph l. Gay-Lussac's ballooning ventures (C&EN, June 21, page 56) reminded Jim Birkett, Nobleboro, Maine, of the Great Lead Balloon Contest. It ended on May 16, 1977, when employees of Arthur D. Little, in Boston, launched three lead balloons. Birkett writes, "This endeavor included many chemists (myself included) and was financed by ADL's public relations department as a follow-on to our founder's successful fabrication of a silk purse from a sow's ear 50-some years earlier."

Anyway, Birkett goes on, a balloon made of 1-mil lead foil and filled with helium will rise if its diameter exceeds about 6 feet. Lead foil that thin, however, is about as robust as "wet Kleenex," Birkett says. Thus the construction, handling, filling, and launching of the three balloons was a problem for the three competing teams, but they solved it.

Birkett says the launch was carried live by national television (NBC) and was well covered by the press. A photograph of the winner, he goes on, "graced the cover of ADL's annual report for 1977."

Big trucks are a specialty

Francis Bartley, who heads research and development at Liebherr Co. in Virginia, directed the development of the T282B, the world's largest truck. Liz Else interviews Bartley in the June 19 issue of New Scientist (page 43).

The truck has only a slight edge over the biggest truck made by Caterpillar, Bartley tells her. The T282B weighs 224 tons, he says. It's 24 feet, 3 inches high at the canopy; it's 47 feet, 6 inches long; and it has a wheelbase of 21 feet, 6 inches. It can carry loads of 400 tons, which makes a loaded weight of 624 tons.

Who buys trucks that big? Miners, among others. Bartley's company sells mainly to coal miners in Wyoming and Australia, copper miners in Chile, iron miners in South Africa, and gold miners in Nevada. Mining companies are always looking for cheaper ways to haul stuff around, and one way to increase ef ficiency is to make trucks bigger.

Trucks of the size that Liebherr makes cost around $3 million. Producers annually sell about 50 to 75 worldwide.

Census data: Decline in reading?

On July 8, the National Endowment for the Arts released a self-styled "bleak assessment" of the health of reading in the U.S. The endowment based its analysis on Bureau of the Census data for 2002. Immediately after press reports of the analysis, Charles McGrath of the New York Times did a follow-up report in that newspaper's edition of July 11.

The census data show that people in the U.S. generally are reading less than they did 20 years ago. The decline, moreover, is accelerating, McGrath reports, especially among people aged 18 to 24 years. Two decades ago, these people were the most likely to pick up a book; now they're the least likely.

McGrath, however, notes problems with the census report, called "Reading at Risk." A big one is that the study covers only literature defined as "any type of fiction, poetry, and plays [that] respondents felt should be included and not just what literary critics might consider literature." Thus, McGrath says, the candidates include mysteries, romances, fantasies, science fiction, thrillers, and westerns.

More than that, McGrath says, the candidates do not include nonfiction. Plato's "Republic" would not qualify as literature, nor would Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." By the census report's standards, McGrath reports, "Horny Creeping Librarian" (Greenleaf Classics, 1984) would qualify as literary reading, but Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos" and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, two very well-written recent books, would not.

McGrath continues, "The notion that imaginative writing is somehow superior to factual writing ... used to flourish in certain English departments ... but these days it seems a dubious distinction." He contends that "good, artful writing ... turns up in lots of places: in memoirs, in travel books, in books about history and science, and sometimes even in books about politics and policy."

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