Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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American Optical Co. (Southbridge, Mass.) last week announced a new trick to detect fakers who claim eye injuries, expected the trick to be of interest to insurance companies and industrial corporations. The gadget makes use of polarized light, which is light filtered so that it vibrates in only one plane. If light filtered through a polarizing crystal encounters a second crystal whose cleavage plane* is turned perpendicularly, it cannot get through. But if the second crystal is rotated until the cleavage plane is parallel to the light waves, the light is then transmitted...
...century scientists have been polarizing light with small natural crystals. Lately a synthetic polarizing material called Polaroid has been developed which can be fabricated into large sheets. In American Optical Co.'s gadget, light from an illuminated test chart first passes through a disk of Polaroid. The person being tested looks through a pair of polarizing lenses, one vertical, one horizontal. By rotating the first disk, the examiner can cut out the vision of either eye at will, so that the subject does not know with which eye he is seeing. It is thus impossible...
Last week a new flood of scientific ideas and gadgets descended upon the musical world. Gadget No. 1 was the chromatic stroboscope. Conceived by Indiana University's Professor Ora L. Railsback and developed by Physicist Robert William Young and Engineers Allen Loomis and O. Hugo Schuck. it was demonstrated at the Music Educators' National Conference in St. Louis. The Young, Loomis & Schuck stroboscope, which sits on a table, blinks and flickers when anybody sings out of tune in its presence, makes caterwauling detectible even to the deaf...
...Latest gadget was put on sale in Chicago last week when veteran dance-band Maestro Carl Rupp, abetted by hopeful piano dealers, introduced his Piano Master. Rupp's ingenious contraption makes playing a tune like Annie Laurie almost as simple as swatting flies on a windowpane. The principle is the same as that of the old-fashioned player piano, minus that part of the machinery which does the actual pressing & releasing of the keys. A motor-driven player-roll mechanism flashes a light beneath each transparent key at the moment when it should be struck. Wherever the student sees...
...fuel. In the nose is its anchor hatch, dual flight control station, bridge, navigation and radio rooms. Three passenger compartments and a lounge in the centre of the hull provide space for 45 passengers by day, can be converted into sleeping accommodation for 26 by night. Fanciest gadget is a lounge table the top of which, lined with mirrors, lifts to expose several wash basins. Aft and below are mail and cargo holds, quarters for the crew of ten. Its four motors mounted on the wings are Wright "Cyclones," 1,000 h.p. each, which give the plane a range...