Word: gadget
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...since radio art is years behind radio science, no one could guess just how the new gadget would be used. One thing was certain: what with facsimile, television, AM, FM, shortwave and phonograph recording, the radio set of tomorrow would do everything but cook...
...huge gadget was known as the "electronic numerical integrator and computer." Its inventors-Dr. John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert-called it "eniac." For their blue-ribbon audience, they demonstrated how eniac could compute the trajectory of a shell in less time than it would take the shell to reach its target. Thus, in a trice, eniac showed its superiority over all its predecessors...
Harvard University has long had a calculator which would do almost any mathematical job. But it was slow; its inner works were like those of an ordinary adding machine. M.I.T. had a faster gadget, but it, too, was largely mechanical. What was needed, said Mauchly and Eckert, was a calculator with no moving parts except the fast-flying electrons inside vacuum tubes. With Army help and money, they built one, in 30 months...
Last week-more than six months after the first atomic bomb exploded-the New Mexican soil which melted to greenish glass was still aboil with radioactivity. Fragments weighing only a fraction of an ounce caused a continuous roar when held near a Geiger-Muller counter, a gadget which clicks once when an ionizing particle passes through it. Ionizing particles zoomed out of the fragments so fast that the clicks they made as they passed through the counter could not be distinguished individually...
...record the earth vibrations caused by dynamite explosions. That was last spring. Like most Americans, Harvard's Professor L. Don Leet had never heard of the Manhattan Project. But in June, the professor was tapped lightly on the shoulder and spirited away to New Mexico. There his new gadget went to work recording the biggest man-made explosion in history...