Word: fi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...oxide. Its name: magnetic tape. On its surface a fantastic amount of sights, sounds and statistical data can be electromagnetically recorded. The tape can be played over and over again without wearing out, can be erased and used again for new recordings. Tape recorders are challenging phonographs for hi-fi music; they fly in jet planes and guided missiles to record test data; in the first earth satellite, a tape recorder will read dozens of instruments and transmit the data to earth. Using magnetic tape, giant computers compile payrolls and forecast sales. Entire libraries and millions of legal documents...
...Paul Weston, Phil Spitalny and George Melachrino did some pioneering as early as the '40s, were later joined by a host of others. TV's Jackie Gleason became such an adept mood picker that his Music for Lovers Only sold half a million copies. For the hi-fi convert whose interest was less in music than in matching his neighbors' woofers and tweeters, the gaudily packaged mood music was ideal: it filled the yawning silence, but was so innocuous that nobody had to listen...
According to Fleming, the "mixture of esteem and spite" Hitler had for the British gave him no clue as to what they would do. When he might have tried to lull them into defeatism, he chose instead to try to scare them with a policy of "fee-fi-fo-fum." This "minatory tone" was a bad mistake. "The menace of invasion was at once a tonic and a drug," writes Fleming. "It braced the islanders to exertions whose necessity seemed beyond question, and it expunged the memories of the disasters they had suffered." The British began to stir themselves...
...voice volleying from one speaker to the other like a hopped-up tennis ball. That exaggerated effect (due to incorrect microphone placement during the recording session) is now gone. Few who have heard really good stereo will ever be satisfied with anything else. As a demonstration of just how fi stereo has become, a team of acoustical engineers put concealed speakers on the stage of San Francisco's Opera House. The San Francisco Symphony went through the motions of playing while the engineers ran off a stereo tape of The Marriage of Figaro overture. Few in the audience guessed...
...Fi Diamonds. The first diamond-point needles produced by a new, cost-cutting automated process were put on national sale by Walco Products, Inc. Walco will treble output to 3,000,000 needles a year, price them so low that makers of medium-priced hi-fi sets can afford to supply diamond needles as standard equipment. Retail price...