Word: gadget
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Because Paul Horowitz has always loved gadgets, and because he had always wondered how much arsenic was on the skin of unwashed apples, he didn't notice the two graduate students talking as he leaned over his newest creation, the proton microscope. They were impatient to try their own more traditional experiments--analyses of ancient pottery shards--and they had driven from MIT to Lincoln Laboratories in Lexington earlier that morning expecting that Horowitz would not be there, that his new gadget would be free. Horowitz, who had come on impulse from his home three minutes away, did not seem...
Because Horowitz understands how every valve, scope and gadget in the lab works, he doesn't like to take chances. He remembers the way some of the lessons were learned. There was the explosion that splattered him with acid when he was very young, and tried some experiments with batteries. And there was a severe shock in a lab several years ago, when a powerful charge ran in a complete circuit from one arm to the other, passing through his heart. He was almost knocked unconscious, but his first thoughts were, "What went wrong?" He quickly realized that there were...
Through most of his young Administration, Gerald Ford has sometimes seemed like a mechanic trying to assemble a complicated gadget by using some new parts and a few old ones. Yet crucial elements turn up missing. Firm policies have been in short supply, timely decisions difficult to make, and a new White House organization to suit the new boss slow in building...
...only that it was not Superman. Actually, the small oddball aircraft winging at 60 m.p.h. was Jefferson County's new law-enforcement weapon out for a test flight. Designed and built out of balsa wood and plastic by sheriffs deputies (who are also model-airplane buffs), the new gadget patrolling the skies was a pilotless plane remotely controlled from the ground. The 8-lb. airborne arsenal can carry up to 2 Ibs. of smoke bombs and tear-gas canisters-to say nothing of grenades and other explosives -strapped to its underbelly...
...childhood has been to hack the tops off cereal cartons, stuff them into an envelope, pound on a stamp, and send away the lumpy packet. The boxtops, plus a coin or two, eventually elicit a "prize." The agony of the wait is exquisite, and the day some ticky-tack gadget arrives can be a private little Christmas...