Word: gadget
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...boat shop. In 1896, two years after his success with his first naphtha-gas boat, he and Hank tried a 2-h.p. Sintz gasoline engine. "It never ran well," says Chris's son Jay, 74, "until Charles Sintz showed up from Grand Rapids two years later with a gadget he called a carburetor...
...customers have proved willing to pay $200 to $1,000, which Tinguely asks for his moving abstractions. But Tinguely has a new gadget, which harnesses one of his machines to a crayon or pen. When a slug is dropped in the slot, the machine traces circles, ellipses and swirls on a piece of paper. A friend is manufacturing the slugs, each marked "Good for One Tinguely." At his next exhibition, visitors will be invited to buy the slugs at perhaps 500 francs apiece. For a mere 5,000 francs more, Tinguely will consent to sign the result...
Bell was quick to realize that the whole world would some day talk with his invention. (He hoped that the entire nation would one day sing The Star-Spangled Banner in unison over the telephone.) But he left the commercial development of his gadget to a group of friends and associates, retired to his laboratory to improve his magic box, continued his work for the deaf...
Trouble-Free Gadget. Today, still riding the crest of a tremendous postwar telephone boom, A. T. & T. is a vast, sprawling creature of wondrous efficiency. Since war's end, it has hiked its take on each U.S. phone from $5.25 to $8-while managing to cut long-distance rates between New York and Los Angeles from $4 to $2.50, and on shorter calls in proportion. Much of that money has gone into $19 billion for plant investment and new equipment, on which A. T. & T. now stands to cash in with dramatic earnings gains...
...developed the most nearly trouble-free gadget yet devised by man. On an average, the telephone man has to repair a phone only once every two years. The party line, that inspiration of jokes and gossip, is all but gone. About 94% of U.S. telephones are now on the dial system, and 8,000,000 customers in 758 communities have direct distance dialing, which enables them to dial some 2,500 cities across the U.S. without going through an operator. This year Washington will become the first big Metropolitan area to have complete direct distance dialing...