Word: apparatus
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When millions of Americans watched the world's first network telecast of an atomic explosion, two months ago, the feat was made possible by a microwave apparatus, which relayed the image from Yucca Flat, Nev. to a transmitting station on the top of Mount Wilson 140 miles away. This week, when the new superliner United States spreads its cuisine before notables on its maiden voyage, the steaks will be cooked on a Radarange, which does the job electronically in half a minute. On the big ship's bridge are two Fathometers to sound the ocean's depth...
Swooping Gondola. Last week the Naval Air Development Center at Johnsville, Pa. unveiled a monstrous apparatus for studying the effect of G-forces on fragile human flesh. In a trim, museumlike building, a soft, cantilever arm whirls in a horizontal circle, carrying on its end a lens-shaped aluminum "gondola" where the helpless "airman" sits. The gondola can be tilted at any angle, directing the G-force in any direction through the passenger's body. Driven by a 4,000-h.p. motor, the arm can generate 15 Gs (much more than a man can stand) in less than...
Deciding whether or not the author is creditable is the first judgement Witness requires. It is by no means the only one. Even assuming that Chambers' description of the personnel and operations of the Communist underground "apparatus" in the United States during the 20's and 30's is unimpeachable, there is still much in Witness that is unacceptable. Witness is first rate as a spy thriller and autobiography; it is second rate, at best, as political thought and philosophy...
Chambers, because of his onetime close and highly emotional association with Communism, sees the "Red menace" in the United States wholly out of proportion. "The terrible meaning of the Washington apparatus," he claims, "is that, even in the United States, that stage of the revolution of our times has been reached, 'that decisive hour," which Karl Marx acutely forecast 100 years ago: when 'a small section of the ruling class joins the revolutionary class.'" Yet when did the apparatus Chambers describes function?--during the Great Depression when a sojurn in the Communist Party became almost part of the regular political...
This same lack of perspective occasionally results in passages that are magnificent in their display of conceit and paranoia. For example, describing his flight from the Communist Party in 1938, he writes, "I therefore decided to try first of all to smash the secret apparatus by myself." His fear of the violence the Party would commit against his person for his desertion not only led him to write at night with a pistol by his hand but ultimately allowed him to write in Witness: "We traveled lightly and I drove as fast as possible. I knew that the Party...