Word: gadgeteers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...swift trucks, trains and planes. As soon as it hits a post office, though, the mail creeps through the hands of human sorters who faced 72 billion pieces of mail last year. To speed up sorting, the Post Office Department is pinning its hopes on a new electronic gadget: an optical scanner that reads machine-printed addresses and sorts mail 15 times faster than the most efficient postal clerk. Introduction of the device, says Postmaster General Larry O'Brien, "is as much an historical event as the issuance of the first U.S. stamp in 1847 or the first city...
...above it was fitted with bulletproof glass. Behind the sandbags and peering through the window, Air Force Major General James Humphreys was all set to start a long-distance operation. With a scalpel attached to a 6-ft. pole, and a pair of pincers that looked like the gadget used to pluck a cereal box off the top shelf of a grocery store, Surgeon Humphreys was going to reach through the opening in the wall and remove an ostrich-egg-sized lump from the back of a Vietnamese farmer...
...sense, the younger Californian artists show American art at its last frontier. They do not mind being "funky," that is, casual, deliberately corny, explorers of the American vernacular. In the ambiance of the gadget, the dragster with painted flames in its exhausts, the never-closed supermarket with motorized shopping cars, the West Coast artist has become his own deus ex machina. They are part-optimistic, part-spooky gardeners in a garish no man's land between art and reality. Like the man who built the Watts Towers, they might, when finished, just move away and never come back...
...Mickey Mouse. White also spent some twelve hours rehearsing with Y "handheld self-maneuvering unit"-the gadget that was to help him walk around in space. The device weighs 7½ lbs., has two small cylinders of compressed oxygen belted to a handle that also acts as a trigger to send jets of air through two hollow tubes, each 2 ft. long. Holding the contraption just below his midriff White could, in his weightless state, manipulate it so as to send him, like a bit of fluff in the wind, in any direction he desired...
...Ford's Thunderbird ($4,486 for a two-door hardtop), Detroit has made such entries as the Buick Riviera ($4,408), the Oldsmobile Starfire ($4,148) and Chrysler's 300-L ($4,168). The new sports cars combine racy lines, bucket seats and consoles, and plush, gadget-filled interiors, can cost more than the least expensive Cadillac, when accessories are added. Cadillac goes higher than any other car, however: its Seventy-Five limousine costs $9,960, and a raft of accessories can drive the price of a Cadillac as high...