Word: ballpoints
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Johnson has traveled widely, but the image he always projected was of a hearty backslapper who stopped to chat with a sidewalk watermelon vendor in Beirut, who invited a Pakistani camel driver to "come and see us, heah?" and who gave out ballpoint pens wherever he went. "He shakes hands with everybody," said a Thai clerk after Johnson stormed Bangkok, "no matter if they are dirty or what." Johnson knows scores of foreign leaders, but their meetings rarely went much beyond the handshaking technique that he calls "pressing the flesh and looking them...
...spoil. Next day, as Parlia ment reassembled, shouting, leaping Tory backbenchers cheered lustily while the newly elected member for Kinross took his oath as an M.P. and moved into his place for the first time on the government's front bench. Pulling out a small red and gold ballpoint pen, Douglas-Home hunched down in his seat and scribbled furiously on slips of paper for the next 42 minutes while Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson delivered a cutting attack on the government...
When Steve left a year later, it was the end of his formal education. He shipped out on an oil tanker, worked in lumber camps, did a tour in the Marine Corps, worked as a sandalmaker, a delivery boy and as a carny huckster. "We were selling these ballpoint pens," he says, "and man, they were worth like 160 apiece. And we were sellin' them for a buck. It was a full scam...
Founder Parker boasted that his pens could write in any language, but after World War II, under his son Kenneth, the company was slow to read some handwriting on the wall. It consisted of one word: ballpoints. "The ballpoint pen," said Kenneth Parker at the time, "is the only pen that makes eight carbon copies without an original." Parker finally got into ballpoints in 1954 after developing what it considered a good point. Luckily, it was shored up meantime by the success of the "51," which was introduced in 1941 and is still the world's bestselling...
...fast-selling Thermo-Fax, a dry method that uses heat from an infra-red lamp to form an image on specially coated papers. But the Xerox machine had a special appeal. It is a dry method that needs no chemicals, can duplicate anything from grease pencil to ballpoint pen, though it is more successful in copying type than photographs. The 914 makes copies by projecting the image of the original document or object onto an electrostatically charged drum coated with a sensitive element called metallic selenium. The machine automatically sprinkles the drum with a black powder that adheres...