Word: clockworks
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Dean Acheson, who made the show run like clockwork, was in his element. Urbane and unruffled, he dealt with the Communists as a Groton football coach with a bunch of interloping ruffians who don't know the rules of the game. He out-talked the Reds without raising his voice, lectured Gromyko on parliamentary procedure, without once getting hot under his immaculate collar or ruffling the tips of his mustache...
Each event was carried out in clockwork regularity--typically English. Hardly had one event ended, when the next was begun. The pole vault, the first event of the afternoon, turned out to be perhaps the most thrilling of the entire meet. Harvard entry Bob Mello and Al Burger of Oxford both cleared 13 feet, but when the bar was raised six inches the two failed to go over in three tries. Since only! firsts count, the bar was lowered three inches to provide a winner. The tall Englishman didn't come close on his tries, but Mello, after missing...
Harry Truman has had his picture taken with so many visiting firemen that White House cameramen have reduced the rite to clockwork routine. Not a moment was lost when he walked out to the White House rose garden one day last week to be photographed with a group of United States Attorneys and their families. He took a place in the front row, the photographers lifted their cameras, and the visitors quickly stiffened and stood looking as though they were about to be squirted with a garden hose...
...glory of the New Jersey orrery was short-lived. During the Revolution, the troops of King George almost "liberated" it as a trophy of war. Then American militia, who thought the funny little wheels made "handsome curiosities," ravaged its clockwork. At the turn of the century, loyal students rescued it from a fire that destroyed the books in the college library, only to have a later generation deface it with penciled signatures...
Eighteenth Century automatons were born of the realization that clockwork is a power source that can be used for more than just telling time. Such triumphs of ingenuity as Venice's famed Clock Tower, where the hours are struck by a pair of huge mechanical Moors, could be, and were, imitated in watches and snuff boxes made for the dandies of the day. Casanova thought himself half naked without several such showpieces about...