Word: gadget
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Looking slightly prehistoric with its long, grasping, enameled neck, the gadget ($29.95) allows the housewife to follow an easy double routine: she pops her dirty clothes into the washer, then washes her hair, sets it while the wet clothes are drying, then attaches the gadget to the emptied dryer and puts her head under it. She emerges dripped and dried, but possibly wondering about the day when she herself might be folded neatly by her husband, and placed with great care in the linen closet...
...Patterson, inventor of the first automated tobacco machine. After World War II, Morehead Patterson decided that the company had to grow or die. Searching for new products, he turned up a crude prototype of an automatic bowling-pm setter. To get the necessary cash to develop the intricate gadget, Patterson swapped off AMF stock to acquire eight small companies with fast-selling products. The Pinspotter, perfected and put on the market in 1951, helped to turn bowling into the most popular U.S. competitive sport. Despite keen competition from the Brunswick Corp., AMF has remained the world's largest maker...
...from now, every attorney might have an electronic connection to a huge national central repository of all the laws and commentaries upon them that he needs." Instead of searching through law libraries for precedents, says Ramo, a lawyer will consult the intellectronics system by means of a typewriter-like gadget in his office which, within seconds, will produce "any information that is available on his particular question...
What atomic workers need is an artificial sixth sense-a cheap, reliable radiation sniffer capable of giving a timely warning of danger. Last week the Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced that it had developed just such a gadget. Unlike earlier devices, which are cumbersome, slow to report or have to be read with close attention, the O.R.N.L. "Personal Radiation Monitor" is no larger than a fountain pen and reacts unmistakably as soon as it scents trouble. Clipped to a lab worker's clothing, the monitor gives off high-pitched chirps and flashes an orange neon light whenever it detects...
...might have stayed in the restaurant business in Boston, but Rosalie, a onetime vocalist with Rudy Vallee's band, did not like restaurants, so Joe bought up the rights to seven Hollywood westerns and became a movie distributor. Nowadays Rosalie is just as important: when Levine needs a gadget to promote one of his pictures-4,000 small rubber bombs to advertise Hercules, or 5,000 genie lamps to push the forthcoming The Wonders of Aladdin-Mrs. Levine gets busy in her own Newton Centre, Mass., workshop. With such help, plus his own shrewd eye for mass entertainment...