Word: gadget
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...Explosive foxhole digger, a 5-lb. gadget that blasts a hole in the ground that is 3½ ft. deep, 3 ft. wide...
...Check Trap. To foil bad-check passers, a fingerprint camera was put on the market by Identity Recorder Co. of Monrovia, Calif, for use in supermarkets and other big-volume stores. The customer rests his check and ten fingertips on the boxlike (18½ by 13½ in.) gadget and the cashier presses a button, getting a picture of both check and fingertips. If the check bounces, the prints are turned over to police. Identity Recorders are leased at $30 a month for the first machine, $6 for each additional machine. Cost per picture (after 1.500 free exposures...
...balloon hung steadily in the eye of the storm. Whenever it rose above a predetermined level, an automatic mechanism released a little of its buoyant gas. Whenever it sank too low, another gadget dropped a bit of ballast. Gentle breezes spiraling inward kept it always close to the storm's calm center...
...father's piano-and-organ factory in Binghamton, N.Y. Link, whose hobby was flying, saw the need for a training device that would prepare flyers for flying before they had to take a real plane into the air. He and his brother George put together a plane-like gadget, offered to train all comers to fly at $85 a head (v. $25 to $50 per hour for in-the-air flight instruction). But no one paid much attention to the trainer until 1934, when the Army Air Corps was suddenly called on to carry air mail. It found...
...tutor. Nabokov's Dozen lacks Lolita's pun-prone pyrotechnics. But it shares with it Nabokov's fascinating gift for translating the machine-tooled commonplaces of U.S. life into a surreal landscape of fantasy, a kind of Poe-like, gadget-haunted region of Weir. Thus a soda-fountain stool violently revolves into a "tall mushroom," a newly screwed-in electric bulb lights up with "the hideous instancy of a dragon's egg hatching in one's bare hand." It is the strength of Nabokov's imagination that makes the characters in these stories live...