Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Dailey's boss insists that Dailey's motorcycle is an incorrigible piece of machinery suffering from perpetual hypochondria. It seems to need some new "indispensable" gadget every other week. To Dailey, however, it is the instrument with which he makes a living and nothing is too good for it. As a result, its own maker would have a hard time recognizing his product...
...marked "Private and Confidential," were 1) a cardboard folder containing enough powdered gelignite to kill the opener, 2) a pencil-sized battery, and 3) a detonating system supposed to work when the envelope was slit with a metal letter opener or when the expectant reader opened the folder. The gadget lacked, of course, any enclosed note of apology...
...little rivers that feed the Great Lakes, an evil invader was swarming last week by the slithering thousands: the sea lamprey. It looks like a mottled, bluish eel, but instead of a proper mouth it has a round sucker, like the rubber gadget that plumbers use to unplug drains. Inside the rim are rows of small teeth. When a hungry lamprey spies a fish, it darts to the fish's side. The sucker's teeth dig in and get a firm grip. Then the lamprey worries a hole in the fish with a file-like tongue and sucks...
...wooden one, standing near by. When they get up to leave, they find no exit. Sometimes McCormick lets them stand there, in mounting confusion; then, with a glacial chuckle, he taps a kickplate in the baseboard and a panel in the wall springs open. He is enough of a gadget-lover to wear a watch on each wrist. One is a fancy computing chronometer. "Tells what day it is, too," he says. "Very convenient when traveling...
...Widow's Devotion. Mom's interest in the gadget business, she told people, was abated by the death of her husband, Rear Admiral Clarence Mason Richards, U.S.N. Mrs. Richards spoke of her husband as "the Skipper," but said that "most of his Navy friends called him 'Possum Belly.' " When the Skipper died in 1944, Mom decided that, out of respect for his memory, she should wear a war widow's pin. To her surprise, she found that there were no pins for war widows...