Word: gadget
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...riel; above the parade wobbled a rickety umbrella of old Italian biplanes. Tribesmen who had lugged a season's karakul skins into market bet their season's earnings on horse races and ram fights. The Western influence was apparent in the gambling, too: the most popular gadget shot darts from an air gun at a moving disc...
...blazing merrily. A Socony-Vacuum physicist named Paul B. Weisz thought he could do better. Last week, in Electronics magazine, he announced an ingenious ray-catching tube so sensitive that it can detect a match flame at 60 feet in broad daylight. The basic idea of Weisz's gadget is the detection of minute quantities of ultra violet radiation. In the earth's absorbent atmosphere most natural and electric light rays, except clear sunlight, contain almost no radiation in the far ultraviolet (below 3,000 angstroms*); but an open flame or spark radiates appreciable amounts in that range...
...instrument, which includes an ordinary telephone receiver, a wire recorder and a push-button control box, is the first fully automatic telephonograph. If its owner is busy or out, the gadget patiently waits out four rings, then croaks: "This is the Ipsophone, Blank Company, Mr. Smith's office. Attention. Please speak-now." If the caller is struck speechless, the machine waits politely for twelve seconds then repeats its invitation. The Ipsophone will listen for up to half an hour without interruption, recording every word...
...gadget, called an electro-cello, was the latest of scientists' attempts to improve on the aged wood and fine Italian hand of the old violin makers. It was fashioned by Caltech's seismologist Dr. Hugo Benioff, who gave up violin playing as a boy because he couldn't stand the noise he made. Eighteen years ago, when he was designing seismographs to measure earthquakes, he decided that there wasn't much difference between a seismograph and a fiddle "except one deals with slow movements and the other with rapid movements." For his scientific cello he mounted...
...face, his tongue extruded, after the law had given him one of the fanciest hangings ever seen in Wyoming. Jay Monaghan does an excellent job of retelling the story in Last of the Bad Men. The gallows was an indoor affair, with a trap worked by a waterpower gadget. Tom had already made one escape from his cell, and was known to have rich and imaginative friends who might try to engineer another getaway. So the sheriff, taking no chances, held the hanging one day in November 1903 in a corridor of the Laramie County jail. Militiamen were posted outdoors...