Word: gadgetized
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...nation; it helped it to grow. Every moviegoer who saw Don Ameche star in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell* knows how the first telephone call was made. Bell was no electrician but an elocutionist and teacher of the deaf. He thought that he could devise a mechanical gadget like the human ear to transmit and receive voices by electrical impulse, had a crude instrument made according to his specifications by his assistant, Thomas Watson. Bell was fiddling with the instrument in the attic of a Boston rooming house one day when he spilled acid on his clothes. Cried Bell...
...President Eisenhower's desk stood a domed metal gadget about half the size of a derby hat. Current flowing from it spun a small propeller. Named SNAP III (for System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power), the little gadget is an atomic battery small and light enough to go into a satellite and keep its instruments and radio voice going at least ten times as long as any chemical battery that the Russians or the U.S. have yet employed...
...bench-testing in secrecy the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Four years later, he made his first flight tests. His tiny, ungainly gadget, launched from a relative's farm near Auburn. Mass., hardly got off the ground, but it was the true precursor of today's mighty rockets. Three years later, an 11-ft. rocket climbed 90 ft. Its noise attracted the local cops and stirred up so much opposition that Goddard left Massachusetts for thinly populated New Mexico. There his rockets climbed higher and higher. In 1935 one reached the sensational height...
...disappearing with bewildering rapidity, the scenes that flashed across history's screen in 1958 often had the disjointed quality of a surrealist movie. Some were dramatic portents of a world to come ? missiles trailing a fiery glow as they took off for deep space, bearing with them a gadget that, when asked, sent back the recorded voice of the President of the U.S., another that reported wondrously complicated readings on radiation far beyond the atmosphere...
...Spin. Since Pioneer III never approached the moon, not all its instruments came into play. The most novel one was an optical gadget designed to send a radio signal when it saw a bright object the size of the moon at a distance of 22,000 miles. The instrument was shielded from the sun, and it would have been activated by a timing device only after the receding earth looked smaller than the approaching moon...