Word: gadget
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...nudging a traveling tray that hangs from the ceiling; food can be carried outdoors on a serving cart powered by a battery. With dual-control ovens, a meal can be started in the kitchen and finished from an adjoining patio. For barbecues in the house there is a special gadget that passes charcoal or hickory smoke through the oven...
...recent Idlewild disaster [Judgments & Prophecies-TIME, Jan. 3] with mixed annoyance and surprise . . . Let Mr. Faulkner ask any qualified pilot whether he would prefer "the seat of his pants" or ILS for a landing with a 200-foot ceiling . . . It seems useless and senseless to blame a "gadget" for such a disaster, especially in view of the evidence, unless of course one is subject to an artistic antimechanical bias. Although it is possible that the thesis of man's superstitious dependence on his more complicated tools might be worthy of some literary development, this instance should not have provided...
Uranium fever struck Oklahoma last week, carried there by a Texas wildcatter named Samuel Labon Shepherd. Eight months ago Oilman Shepherd was checking land in Nowata County in northeastern Oklahoma with a scintillator, an electric gadget used to find oil as well as uranium. Around him were wells producing oil by the waterflood method, in which oil is recovered by pumping water into the ground, thus increasing the underground pressure and forcing oil up the well. On the surface, the oil and water are separated, and the water is passed through a sand filter before being recirculated through the well...
...such as "Pshhh, pshhh, pshhh; psi, psi, psi; tsk, tsk, tsk." Birding virtuosos learn to give lifelike imitations of the screech owl's eerie, fluty tremolo. Others carry the Audubon Bird Call-a tiny birchwood tube in which they rotate a pewter plunger: it squeaks like crazy. Latest gadget is a 98? plastic "bird" with a trombone slide that can be made to chirp and whistle arpeggios like an amorous cardinal or sing the mournful minor of the white-throated sparrow...
...seniority as a four-engine over-water captain probably told him where the trouble was. But he dared not accept that knowledge and act on it. He dared not flout and affront, even with his own life too at stake, our cultural postulate of the infallibility of machines, instruments, gadgets. I grieve for him, for that moment's victims. We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any mechanical [gadget] superior to any man simply because the one, being mechanical, is infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject...