Word: gadget
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...examined lots of death rays, which inventors claimed could melt rocks, kill animals at great distances. None met his specifications. Some were fakes; their inventors fled as soon as Dr. Murray hove in sight. Best performer: a heat-projecting gadget which, its inventor claimed, cooked a canary (in Spain) at 30 feet...
Forebodings. In his Forest Hills house and in his Lake Success office, Lie treasures a secret gadget: a loudspeaker connected with the U.N. public-address system which permits him to follow the debate in any U.N. committee room. Frequently, when he hears something he dislikes, Lie picks up the phone and passes a tip to an aide on the scene...
Magic Sandwich. Most recent gadget is the "birefringent filter," designed in 1940 by Dr. John W. Evans of Chabot Observatory, Oakland, Calif. It is a multi-decker sandwich of thin quartz plates and sheets of polaroid, which passes only light of a single pure color. Accomplishing the same object as the spectroheliograph, it is much more effective and easier for astronomers to use. When built into a coronagraph, it lets the complexities of the sun's atmosphere be seen in all their terrifying glory...
...other gadget: sonar, radar's supersonic cousin. A sonar-equipped locomotive, by means of an oscillator and amplifier, would keep sending out whistle blasts pitched so high that nobody could hear them; but if a signal box ahead had its danger arm up, a reflector would send back the sound waves to the locomotive. There a microphone would detect the supersonic racket, a bell would ring (or a light flash), and the engineer would throttle down to his foggy-foggy...
...Pierce of Harvard bounced radio waves off the meteor trails. His gadget gave a dramatic whistle, like the screech of an approaching shell, whenever a meteor hit the atmosphere. Other scientists took to radar, which can see through clouds as if they were Cellophane. At the Bureau of Standards' laboratory near Sterling, Va., they watched bright blobs of light on a radarscope. These were made, they said, by the radar beam reflected from hot, ionized gases-the remains of meteors as they disintegrated in the atmosphere 50 to 80 miles...