Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week-more than six months after the first atomic bomb exploded-the New Mexican soil which melted to greenish glass was still aboil with radioactivity. Fragments weighing only a fraction of an ounce caused a continuous roar when held near a Geiger-Muller counter, a gadget which clicks once when an ionizing particle passes through it. Ionizing particles zoomed out of the fragments so fast that the clicks they made as they passed through the counter could not be distinguished individually...
...record the earth vibrations caused by dynamite explosions. That was last spring. Like most Americans, Harvard's Professor L. Don Leet had never heard of the Manhattan Project. But in June, the professor was tapped lightly on the shoulder and spirited away to New Mexico. There his new gadget went to work recording the biggest man-made explosion in history...
...Admiral Richardson, talking across the gadget-littered desk, did not respond to the President's ebullience. He was in tensely worried ; he had been brooding for months over the crowded anchorage at Pearl Harbor, the fleet's lack of manpower, ammunition, shore defenses, a proper supply train. Neither the Navy nor the nation, he had concluded, was ready...
...increase their broadcasting time to a minimum of 28 hours a week (twice as much as the present best average in New York). This boost in time will encourage manufacturers to rush new sets. Thus far, a price up to $500 has been too steep for such an idle gadget...
...camera was developed for the Surgeon General's Office, which wanted rapid, perfect, foolproof pictures of surgical operations. The inventors have great hopes for it. At present the gadget is a typical military job: too expensive and too heavy. The "power-pack" which provides the current weighs 27 Ibs. But by spring, it may be streamlined for the civilian market into a lighter, more practical model...