Word: gadget
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...best way to pierce these mysteries is to see how they affect the lunar probe. Such data alone will make the gadget a superb spy in space. It hardly matters whether it also becomes the greatest billiard shot in the history...
...play the guitar. Just turn the dial and strum. No fingering necessary . . . You can go on TV with your own guitar and your own entertainment." This invitation to the arts is part of an advertisement for the Dial-A-Chord, a $12 gadget that enables a fledgling guitarist to change chords at the flick of a plastic wheel and presumably to toss off a habanera at first strumming. Music merchants on their way home last week from their annual convention in Chicago went armed with dozens of such labor-saving and interest-killing devices designed to hook some...
...males in the early years of the century. It was not until World War I that makeup crawled back to respectability, and not until the Roaring Twenties that it dared to flaunt its painted face-under a permanent wave, invented in Switzerland by Charles Nessler. This wonderful electric gadget brought hope that every head could be curly-though many a hair curled at the early cost: $200. (In 1938 San Francisco's Willat company introduced the cold wave, which gradually made the machine permanent obsolete...
Three Chimps First. With all these pressing medical problems to be solved, why does man feel himself impelled toward, the dark unfathom'd caves of outer space? For one thing, despite his physical and emotional inadequacies, he is still a space-saving, weight-saving gadget compared with any electronic brain yet constructed. A cynical explanation favored in cybernetic circles: "Nowhere else can you obtain a self-maintaining computer with built-in judgment, which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor -and by people who like their work so well." To Dr. Simons, first man to have so long...
What will sell cars in the future? Says Researcher Cheskin: "The sober look, the dignified form, the basically functional gadget, the single color or truly two-tone color. Useless gadgets do not appeal to the 1958 shoppers and will appeal to the 1959 and 1960 shoppers even less. The jukebox effect will disappear. Elaborate ornamentation of chrome and multiple colors will be discarded. Finally, consumers are also beginning to resent forced obsolescence. When yearly fashions were limited to women's apparel, there was almost universal acceptance. The public did not resist the yearly car design changes. Then other hard...