Word: gadgeteers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Compos-A-Tune was invented by Louis Ruben, a round-faced, bespectacled citizen of Bayonne, N.J. A disciple of the late Joseph Schillinger, Manhattan musicologist who believed symphonies might someday be manufactured by machinery, Ruben based his gadget on an analysis of more than 1,000 popular tunes...
This colossal gadget was invented by Harvard's Associate Professor (now Commander) Howard H. Aiken, with the assistance of engineers of International Business Machines Corp., which built the machine and presented it to Harvard last week. Its calculating versatility is much greater than that of the even more complicated differential analyzer, developed by Vannevar Bush and associates at M.I.T. (TIME, Nov. 29), which merely solves intricate differential equations...
University of Pennsylvania's Track Coach Lawson Robertson took swift advantage of this news. Summoning reporters and photographers, he demonstrated a Danish gadget guaranteed to be proof against both nervous sprinters and unskillful starting officials. In front of each runner's marks lie two metal plates connected by wire to the starting gun. Unless every runner has his fingers on his plates the gun cannot be fired...
...Vivid Gadget. The portable recorders carried straight into battle by some radiomen (best was the Navy's film recorder) gave war reporting a vividness it has never had before. NBC's Wright Bryan had a recorder aboard a transport plane going in with paratroops. He described the scene and tension admirably, but none of his words matched the fateful clicks as the paratroopers hooked up their automatic release belts. A BBC recording caught a bargeload of British Tommies singing For Me and My Gal on their way to Normandy...
...with the very ground dangerous and explosive: "The Germans . . . use all the devilish, fiendish devices of war, things that we don't dare use. Poisoned mines, ones that bounce up and spread death for 25 yards; steel darts, that will go right through you; castorators, a nice little gadget that when you step on it blows your groin...