Slocum
n.— «Sea gliders were conceived in the 1980s by Douglas Webb, a former researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Only in recent years, though, have they become fully operational and more capable. Some are called “Slocums,” after Joshua Slocum, who in 1898 was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world.…It is a Slocum that has been modified to harvest the energy that it needs to operate its buoyancy-propulsion system from the sea itself. In theory, this sea glider could travel for thousands of kilometres on voyages that could last for years.» —“Run silent, run green” Economist (United Kingdom) Feb. 28, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
An engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, says he and his colleagues refer to tangled underwater cables as wuzzles. Does anyone else? At least as early as the mid-19th century, the verb wuzzle has meant “to...