Word: crude
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...preserved by Charles Perrault, is a legend that elucidates one of life's darkest mysteries: how the human soul lies sunk in a deathlike trance until it is awakened by the heroic spirit. Yet as presented in this "herculean," $6,000,000 version, the myth is just crude continuity for a colossal comic strip, and the more boings and EEEEEEEKs the moviemaker can get into his story, the better he seems to like...
Even the drawing in Sleeping Beauty is crude: a compromise between sentimental, crayon-book childishness and the sort of cute, commercial cubism that tries to seem daring but is really just square. The hero and heroine are sugar sculpture, and the witch looks like a clumsy tracing from a Charles Addams cartoon. The plot often seems to owe less to the tradition of the fairy tale than to the formula of the monster movie. In the final reel it is not a mere old-fashioned witch the hero has to kill, but the very latest model of The Thing From...
...Story of Alexander Graham Bell* knows how the first telephone call was made. Bell was no electrician but an elocutionist and teacher of the deaf. He thought that he could devise a mechanical gadget like the human ear to transmit and receive voices by electrical impulse, had a crude instrument made according to his specifications by his assistant, Thomas Watson. Bell was fiddling with the instrument in the attic of a Boston rooming house one day when he spilled acid on his clothes. Cried Bell: "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." Watson, at the end of a receiver...
...growing telephone industry, a Kansas City undertaker named Almon B. Strowger made one of the greatest contributions. Strowger was convinced that a competitor was bribing the operator, trying to beat him out of business by snatching death calls intended for him. To eliminate the operator, Strowger invented the first, crude dial system, set up his own company after a Bell official turned down his system. Not till the independents had widely installed the dial did A. T. & T. go along. Many people protested the move. When dial phones were installed in the Capitol in 1930, Senator Carter Glass even tried...
...despite import quotas. Because of a worldwide glut in oil, British Petroleum Co. lopped 18? per bbl. off the price of Mideast oil. Creole Petroleum cut 5? to 15? off the price of Venezuelan oil, and in the U.S., Gulf and Ohio Oil dropped their buying price for crude...