Fictional Materials for OED

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Here is a cite for unobtainium in November 1957 in the same milieu.

Date: November 9, 1957
Newspaper: Greensboro Record
Newspaper Location: Greensboro, North Carolina
Article: Top AF General Describes Metal
Quote Page: A7
Column 4
Database: GenealogyBank

[Begin excerpt]
DAYTON, Ohio, Nov. 9
A top Air Materiel Command officer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
has disclosed specifications of the ultimate material sought by the
Air Force.

He is Maj. Gen. William O. Senter, chief of procurement and
production, who describes it this way:

"It must be practically weightless, infinitely strong, ...
...

"We haven't found this material yet," General Senter says, "but we do
have a name for it. We call it "unobtainium."
[End excerpt]

OCR errors are probably present.
Garson

On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Fictional Materials for OED
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 8:32 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>> > CNN this a.m.: "The technology does not exist! It's made of unobtainium!"
>> >
>>
>> http://goo.gl/LN7zy6
>>
>> "This happens in the genre so often that there is even a generic word for
>> it: unobtainium."
>>
>> Foreward (?) of E[dward] E[lmer] Smith, The Skylark of Space, 1928.
>
> That introduction was written in 2001, unfortunately.
>
> I wrote about "unobtainium" when the movie "Avatar" came out, and
> noted that Paul Dickson's "Dictionary of the Space Age" dates it back
> to 1958, in Woodford Heflin's "Interim Glossary, Aero-Space Terms":
>
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/at-the-movies-airworld-unobtainium/
>
> Michael Quinion gives the same cite:
>
> http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-uno1.htm
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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