Word: gadgeteers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...gadget was as flashy as a jukebox, and paid off even better. It was called the "Spectro-Chrome." A 1,000-watt bulb was propped up in the back of it, shining through red, yellow, green, blue and violet panes of glass. The instructions that came with the box reflected sunny assurance: it would "measure and restore radioactive and radio-emitive equilibrium by attuned color waves." It would also cure all diseases that man is heir...
...disease, indigo for pain. Purple would decrease sex desire, scarlet increase it. Gonorrhea could be cured, in early cases, by green or turquoise, in later cases by lemon; syphilis, by two weeks of green plus four weeks of lemon. No matter what was the matter with them, said the gadget's inventor, patients should sleep with their heads pointed north, give up meat, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, and stare at the Spectro-Chrome...
Gold in a Gadget. The Spectro-Chrome (TIME, June 2, 1947) soon became a million-dollar business for white-goateed, bespectacled Dinshah Pestanji Framji Ghadiali, born in Bombay 74 years ago and a naturalized U.S. citizen* since 1917. Since 1920 he has sold at least 10,000 memberships at $90 apiece (recently hiked to $100) in his "Spectro-Chrome Institute." Members got the machine, plus a "favorscope" which tells the best time for starting treatment; for $3.50 a year they could get up-to-date guidance from Ghadiali; for another $10, they could get new panes if the old ones...
Cripps called his new gadget a "special once-for-all levy." But the conservative Daily Telegraph assailed it as "class legislation of the worst type. ... A budget professedly designed to stimulate incentive studiously ignores the risk-taker." Indignant investors were reminded that when Sir Robert Peel proposed an income tax in 1842 he had said: "I think it just to limit the duration to three years...
Psychiatrists would like to have some sure method of telling whether a patient is schizophrenic-and whether treatment is doing him any good. Dr. Robert G. Grenell, at Yale University's department of neuroanatomy, added a new idea to an old gadget, evolved a technique that he hopes will answer both questions...