Tungsten Quotes

Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naive, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel. I am humanity He crawled. I am humanity. He fell. I am humanity. He got up.

Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.

What’s your favorite word?” Startled, I looked up at him, unsure I’d heard him right. “My favorite word?” He nodded, slipping his glasses up his nose with a quick, practiced scrunch of his face that made him look angry and then surprised within a single second. “You have seven boxes of books up here. A wild guess tells me you like words.” I suppose I had never thought about having a favorite word, but now that he asked, I kind of liked the idea. I let my eyes lose focus as I thought. “Ranunculus,” I said after a moment. “What?” “Ranunculus. It’s a kind of flower. It’s such a weird word but the flowers are so pretty, I like how unexpected that is.” They were my Mom’s favorite, I didn’t say. “That’s a pretty girly answer.” “Well, I am a girl.” He kept his eyes on his feet but I knew I wasn’t imagining the gleam of interest I’d seen when I said ranunculus. I bet he had expected me to say unicorn or daisy or vampire. “What about you? What’s your favorite word? I bet it’s tungsten. Or, like, amphibian.” He quirked a smile, answering, “Regurgitate.” Scrunching my nose, I stared at him. “That is a gross word.” This made him smile even wider. “I like the hard consonant sounds in it. It kinda sounds like exactly what it means.” “An onomatopoeia?” I half expected trumpets to blast revelatory music from an invisible speaker in the wall from the way Elliot stared at me, lips parted and glasses slowly sliding down his nose. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not a complete idiot, you know. You don’t have to look so surprised that I know some big words.” “I never thought you were an idiot,” he said quietly, looking toward the box and pulling out another book to hand to me. For a long time after we returned to our slow, inefficient method of unpacking the books, I could feel him looking up and watching me, tiny flashes of stolen glances. I pretended I didn’t notice.

Scheele independently discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—but received credit for none of them in his lifetime. He had an unfortunate habit of tasting every substance he worked with, as a way of familiarizing himself with its properties, and eventually the practice caught up with him.

While not all elements in the Periodic Table are represented by letters of the alphabet, some in this book (Magical Elements of the Periodic Table Presented Alphabetically by the Metal Horn Unicorns), are introduced by alternate designations. For instance, Tungsten is also known as Wolfram so “W” is used as the entry for that alphabetical letter in this book. The letter “W” is also used as the atomic symbol for Tungsten in all periodic tables.

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, ‘smoked salmon and Bach.’ (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same).

Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel. I am humanity.

The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expressed as violence. Holden’s

I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.

He is, however,” Amos continued, “keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel’s reactor.” Holden ran his fingers through his hair. “So not too generous, then.” “Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c.

...We ourselves were made of the very same elements as composed the sun and stars, that some of my atoms might once have been in a distant star. But it frightened me too, made me feel that my atoms were only on loan and might fly apart at any time, fly away like the fine talcum powder I saw in the bathroom.

I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science – focusing on them, holding myself together in the chaos...create my own world from the neutrality and beauty of nature, so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduction,

The periodic table was incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I could never adequately analyze what I meant here by beauty – simplicity? coherence? rhythm? inevitability? Or perhaps it was the symmetry, the comprehensiveness of every element firmly locked into its place, with no gaps, no exceptions, everything implying everything else.

Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel. I am humanity. He crawled. I am humanity. He fell. I am humanity. He got up.

This was an old-time, black-and-white-movie kiss, with the orchestra swelling in my chest, hot tungsten lamps carving out our shadows. My bones turned to air, nothing holding me up but the fierceness of my desire.

The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expressed as violence.

Rooney was in the first trimester of her pregnancy with the couple’s baby. Frazer was usually more cautious with his affection, but his friendship with the rookie agent and damaged assassin had begun under extraordinary circumstances. The connection was strong as tungsten steel, the only thing that would break it was death—a real possibility if anyone discovered their secrets. “Is she all right?” he asked carefully. “She will be.

The ingenious way in which Dennison and his colleagues broke out of their seemingly impregnable prison, using only a steel belt buckle, a tungsten filament, three hens' eggs, and twelve chemicals that can be readily obtained from the human body, is too well known to be repeated here.

The soil beneath her smelled rich and wet;the only sound in the absolute silence was her breathing. Grace stood still, as still as she possibly could and listened to the quiet, to the stillness, absorbing the strange beauty. She became aware of her heart beating, pumping blood throughout her body. As she stood here alone at sunrise on this mountain, it was more than dreamlike. Accustomed to a world of limestone-tiled hallways lit by tungsten-filament halogen that smelled of artificial lemon and barbecue chemicals and digitized french fry-flavor molecules, Grace felt that she had stumbled into another world. This high peaceful place, it was heavenlike.

God thinks in numbers,’ Auntie Len used to say. ‘Numbers are the way the world is put together.

My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.

When we believe in and experience love as God’s meaning, love becomes our meaning, for we become like the God we worship.68 When love becomes our meaning, the ramifications for evangelism are immense. We are cleansed of legalism, judgmentalism, coercion, and exploitation. We are liberated so that we can now see the “total fact” of others, which is so much more than their guilt and sin, or their wounds. This is not a sentimental, soft love. It is a tungsten power that respects others, says “no” to injustice, and unflinchingly involves itself in the muck and mire of broken lives. We can love in this way only because God first loves us.

To have perceived an overall organization, a superarching principle uniting and relating all the elements, had a quality of the miraculous, of genius. And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God.

Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.* HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.21

You’re mad. You’ve gone insane. He’d thought so, too. He fought to keep her alive while every night he left her to kill the rest. Why should one live though the world itself will perish? She illumined the lightless—her life the lamp, the last star in a dying universe. I am humanity, she had written. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel. He must get up. If he can’t, the light will go out. The world will be consumed by the crushing dark. But the totality of the atmosphere pushed him down and held him under, five quadrillion tons of bone-breaking force. The system had crashed. Taxed past its limits, the alien technology installed inside his human body when he was thirteen had shut down. There was nothing to sustain or protect him now. Burned and broken, his human body was no different from his former prey’s. Fragile. Delicate. Vulnerable. Alone. He was not one of them. He was completely one of them. Wholly Other. Fully human. He rolled onto his side. His back spasmed. Blood rushed into his mouth. He spat it out. Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel. I am humanity. He crawled. I am humanity. He fell. I am humanity. He got up.

Plan B," said Harry. "Encase the Dementor in dense metal with a high melting point, probably tungsten, drop it into an active volcano, and hope it ends up inside Earth's mantle.

Holden was imagining what several hundred rounds of Teflon-coated tungsten steel going five thousand meters per second would do to human bodies when Alex threw down the throttle and a roomful of elephants swan dived onto his chest.

My favourite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals – my old and valued friends – Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

a ‘Divine mathematics,’ with which one could create the richest possible reality by the most economical means, and this, it now seemed to me, was everywhere apparent: in the beautiful economy by which millions of compounds could be made from a few dozen elements, and the hundred-odd elements from hydrogen itself; the economy by which the whole range of atoms was composed from two or three particles; and in the way that their stability and identity were guaranteed by the quantal numbers of the atom itself – all this was beautiful enough to be the work of God.

...too-muchness had no doubt been noticed at school, for it was around this time that I received a school report that said, ‘Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.

...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the ‘memory hole’ peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past

A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.

[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.

I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.

She had an intense feeling for structure, the way things were put together – whether they were human bodies, or plants, or scientific instruments or machines.

Holden was imagining what several hundred rounds of Teflon-coated tungsten steel going five thousand meters per second would do to human bodies

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

I am SAM, and this is my first mission. Wish me luck. Actually, don’t bother. I’m that good. I need to move fast, but I have to be careful too.This high-tech fortress disguised as a middle school has security systems like Hershey, Pennsylvania, has chocolate. My biggest concern (and archnemesis) is Jan I. Tor. He’s the half-human, half-cyborg “cleaning service” they use for “light security” around here. Yeah, right. Tor’s definition of “light security” is that he only kills you once if he finds you. So I wait in super-stealthy silence while Tor hovers past my hiding spot with his motion detectors running, laser cannons loaded, and a big dust mop attachment on his robotic arm. He’s cleaning that floor to within an inch of its life, but it could be me next. As soon as Tor’s out of range, I slip off my tungsten gripper shoes. Believe me, once he’s been through here, you do not want to leave footprints behind. That would be like leaving a business card in Sergeant Stricker’s in-box. Stricker is the big cheese who runs this place, and she’s all human, but just as scary as Tor. I don’t want to rumble with either one of those two. So I program the shoes to self-destruct and drop them in the trash. FWOOM! The coast is clear now, and I sneak back into action. I work my way up the corridor in my spy socks, quiet as a ghost walking on cotton balls. Very, very puffy cotton balls—I’m that quiet. What I need is the perfect place to leave the package I came here to deliver. That’s the mission, but I can’t just do it anywhere. I have to choose wisely. Bathroom? Nah. Too echoey. Library? Nah. Only one exit, and I can’t take that risk. Main lobby? Hmm… maybe so. In fact, I wish I’d thought of that on my way in. I could have saved myself one very expensive pair of tungsten gripper shoes. Once my radar-enabled Rolex watch tells me the main lobby is clear, I slide in there and get right to work. I enter the access code on my briefcase, confirm with my thumbprint, and then pop the case open. After that, it takes exactly seven seconds and one ordinary roll of masking tape to secure my package to the wall. That’s it. Package delivered. Mission accomplished. Catch you next time—because there’s no way you’ll ever catch me. SAM out!

Neither I have golden Luck nor I could earn a hell of a lot of money. I also won't consider myself handsome, never had girls around me. I am hardly skilled in any domain in demand. The only thing that I got is a Spine made of Tungsten. And I am absolutely proud of it, no matter If I have lost everything else because of it.

She has the tungsten will

Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up.... Both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London.

this tungsten spark we call our soul,

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but essentially, yes. The plane can carry bombs, but that’s not what it’d be using. A while back, there was a program called ‘Rods of God.’ It basically involved placing these twenty-meter-long rocket-assisted tungsten rods on a satellite in space. We could then have the satellite aim at a hardened underground bunker or a target that was heavily defended and release the rod from space. The rod would fall through the atmosphere, gaining in speed. Once in the upper atmosphere, a rocket on the back would power up and help the rod accelerate to speeds of up to Mach 20 or roughly fifteen thousand miles per hour. When it hit the target, it’d be like hitting it with a three-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead, only without any of the nuclear fallout.

The operation—which was called “Planet”—was cancelled. On 15 May, another attempt called “Brawn” was cancelled due to bad weather, after the Barracudas had already started from the carriers. Certainly, the harsh northern weather was turning out to be the Tirpitz’s first line of defense. Barely ten days after the second attempt to repeat Tungsten, a third attempt called Operation Tiger Claw was cancelled

With transmutation he controls the economy of the whole set-up of your Empire. Mineral holdings won’t be worth a sneeze when Riose can make tungsten out of aluminium and iridium out of iron. An entire production system based on the scarcity of certain elements and the abundance of others is thrown completely out of whack. There’ll be the greatest disjointment the Empire has ever seen, and only Riose will be able to stop it. And there is the question of this new power I mentioned, the use of which won’t give Riose religious heebies. ‘There’s nothing that can stop him

In transforming natural environments into artificial form, the United States is the most advanced country in the world. This is not an accident. It is inherent in our economic system. To the capitalist, profit-oriented mind, there is no outrage so great as the existence of some unmediated nook or cranny of creation which has not been converted into a new form that can then be sold for money. This is because in the act of converting the natural into the artificial, something with no inherent economic value becomes “productive” in the capitalist sense. An uninhabited desert is “nonproductive” unless it can be mined for uranium or irrigated for farms or covered with tracts of homes. A forest of uncut trees is nonproductive. A piece of land which has not been built upon is nonproductive. Coal or oil that remains in the ground is nonproductive. Animals living wildly are nonproductive. Virtually any land, any space, any material, any time that remains in an original, unprocessed, unconverted form is an outrage to the sensibilities of the capitalist mind. Iron, tungsten, trees, oil, sulphur, jaguars and open space are searched out and transformed because transformation creates economic benefits for the transformers. In economics this transformation has a name: “value added.” Value added derives from all the processes that alter a raw material from something which has no intrinsic economic value to something which does. Each change in form, say, from iron ore in the ground to iron or steel to car to car which is heavily advertised adds value to the material. The only raw materials which have intrinsic economic value before processing are gold and silver. This is only because people have agreed on these values in order to define a value for paper money, which certainly has no intrinsic value. It is, then, the nature of profit seeking to convert as much as possible of what has not been processed and exists in its own right into something which has the potential for economic gain.

I'm stronger than titanium, tungsten, or steel; In prayer to You I blaze as I kneel.

traditional Norse blessing. Facing in each direction as he speaks, he forbids all evil from entering our lives from this point forward. After invoking the gods, our ancestors, and everyone gathered here today as our witnesses, he lights a symbolic candle to purify us so that we may enter our marriage with unadulterated love. Dipping an evergreen sprig into a bowl of holy water, he anoints Ella and me, offering his blessings before binding our hands together with the rite of the white ribbon. We recite a prayer to Frigga, the goddess of marriage, followed by our vows promising to love, honor, and cherish each other. The rings we exchange were personally chosen by Ella. A moonstone set into oxidized silver for her, and a brushed silver Tungsten band for me. As the final rite of passage into married life, the Gothi pours a goblet of mead wine and brings our free hands together around the stem, encouraging each of us to drink. Once we do, he declares us bound for eternity as husband and wife. He removes the goblet, and I bring my hand to Ella’s face, sealing our marriage with a kiss. Around us, bells begin to ring, a salute from the witnesses. But Ella and I only have eyes for each other as we seal our commitment to one another. When the Gothi opens the circle again with one last symbolic prayer, we exit to our new life amongst our family and friends. Celebrations are in order, and the chef has prepared a feast of traditional foods.

It’s as if we have lamps but won’t plug them in because our ancestors believed electricity was spirit-made. Having lost belief in spirits, we sit in the dark. There’s no need. We have holidays and rituals, crafted like tungsten and glass for glowing. We have poems that buzz with electric charge. Let’s plug them in.

But let’s assume it’s an indestructible hair dryer. And if we have something as cool as an indestructible hair dryer, it seems like a shame to limit it to 1875 watts. With 18,750 watts flowing out of the hair dryer, the surface of the box reaches over 200°C (475°F), as hot as a skillet on low-medium. I wonder how high this dial goes. There’s a distressing amount of space left on the dial. The surface of the box is now 600°C, hot enough to glow a dim red. If it’s made of aluminium, the inside is starting to melt. If it’s made of lead, the outside is starting to melt. If it’s on a wood floor, the house is on fire. But it doesn’t matter what’s happening around it; the hair dryer is indestructible. Two megawatts pumped into a laser is enough to destroy missiles. At 1300°C, the box is now about the temperature of lava. One more notch. This hair dryer is probably not up to code. Now 18 megawatts are flowing into the box. The surface of the box reaches 2400°C. If it were steel, it would have melted by now. If it’s made of something like tungsten, it might conceivably last a little longer. Just one more, then we’ll stop. This much power—187 megawatts—is enough to make the box glow white. Not a lot of materials can survive these conditions, so we’ll have to assume the box is indestructible. The floor is made of lava. Unfortunately, the floor isn’t. Before it can burn its way through the floor, someone throws a water balloon under it. The burst of steam launches the box out the front door and onto the sidewalk.​[​2​]​ We’re at 1.875 gigawatts (I lied about stopping). According to Back to the Future, the hair dryer is now drawing enough power to travel back in time. The box is blindingly bright, and you can’t get closer than a few hundred meters due to the intense heat. It sits in the middle of a growing pool of lava. Anything within 50–100 meters bursts into flame. A column of heat and smoke rise high into the air. Periodic explosions of gas beneath the box launch it into the air, and it starts fires and forms a new lava pool where it lands. We keep turning the dial. At 18.7 gigawatts, the conditions around the box are similar to those on the pad during a space shuttle launch.

the big, powerful ship was moving at the same rate as the asteroid below—47.05 miles per second. He came slogging back excitedly, put his eyes to the eyepiece. He gasped, and his big body shook with joyful ejaculations. “She checks down to the last dimension,” Bob chortled, working with slide-rule and logarithm tables. “Now all we have to do is find out if she’s made of tungsten, iron, quartz crystals, and cinnabar! But there couldn’t be two asteroids of that shape anywhere else in the Belt, so this has to be it!

The turret on one of his A3s swung thirty degrees to the left and fired a 120 mm round of XM1028 Canister at a platoon-sized group of the enemy, which emerged from the smoking ruins of a wooden cottage. More than a thousand tungsten balls, expelled from the container as the shot left the gun’s muzzle, swept over the Japanese like an evil wind, reducing them to pink mist and bone fragments. He saw a Japanese Type 94 “tankette” literally shredded into metal chips as four separate 30 mm chain guns took it under fire. It flew to pieces, the disintegrating steel plate perversely reminding him of leaves blown from a tree in a high wind.

Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c.

For faster or deeper water, use a big fly tied on a size 8 to 12 hook, and weight it heavily with tungsten bead heads and/ or nontoxic wire. For slower or shallower water, use a small fly tied on a size 12 to 16 hook and weighted only with a bead head or only with wire.

The darkness folded around him as he walked away. Her hands were made of lead and tungsten. Her belly felt hurt and empty as a miscarriage. And underneath the hurt and the horror, the betrayal and the pleasure she took in her distress, something else stirred and lifted it's head. It took her time to recognize it as pride, and even then she couldn't have said who or what she was proud of. Only that she was.

We would sit down fifteen, sometimes twenty, to the table on seder nights: my parents; the maiden aunts - Birdie, Len, and before the war, Dora, sometimes Annie; cousins of varying degree, visiting from France or Switzerland; and always a stranger or two would come. There was a beautiful, embroidered tablecloth which Annie had brought us from Jerusalem, gleaming white and gold on the table. My mother, knowing that sooner or later there would be accidents, always had a preemptive "spill" herself - she would manage somehow, very early in the evening, to tip a bottle of red wine onto the tablecloth, and thereafter no guest would be embarrassed if they knocked over a glass. Though I know she did this deliberately, I could never predict how or when the "accident" would occur; it always looked absolutely spontaneous and authentic. (She would immediately spread salt on he wine stain, and it became much paler, almost disappearing; I wondered why salt had this power.)

Gus’s features twisted, wondering what in the hell he’d gotten into? The air traced the edges of his cuts, the cuts that Alice made, and he moaned at the fire in his poor belly. “You’re probably wondering why I cut you so many times?” She asked idly. Then, without warning, she yanked the scalpel out of his belly, getting a hiss out of him, and slashed open his right arm with one flick. That tungsten jolt of pain caused Gus to buck against his bonds. “It’s because, they smell you see,” Alice told him. She slashed the other white arm, as neatly as opening a fish. “That’s why they’re making a racket. My babies are hungry. Sooooooooo hungry. Am I bad for doing this? I don’t think so. I’m cleaning the

important, it provided the bright prospect of fortunes to be made through exploitation of the land and its people. To that end, the French would transform much of the Vietnamese landscape. In Cochinchina, they carved out a complex network of canals that turned tens of thousands of acres of marshy wilderness into some of the most productive rice-growing country on earth. They developed modern ports at Haiphong and Danang and Saigon, too, so that Vietnamese raw material could more efficiently be shipped abroad and French-manufactured goods could more easily be unloaded. They also built a railroad to move French products north from Saigon all the way to China; one out of three of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese conscripted to lay its tracks is thought to have died along the way. The French hacked down highland forests as well, displacing tribal people who depended on them for their livelihood, and planted millions of rubber trees in their place; the miserably paid contract workers who tapped the trees were ravaged by malaria and “treated like human cattle,” one colonist admitted, and “terrorized by the overseers….On the rubber plantations the people had a habit of saying that children did not have a chance to know their fathers, nor dogs their masters.” In the North, tens of thousands of contract laborers risked their lives beneath the earth, mining coal, tin, tungsten, and zinc for the benefit of investors in France. They worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and those who tried to get away were often beaten before being forced back to work.