Word: gadgetized
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...Plaster of Paris absorbs moisture, and the wetter it gets, the lower its electrical resistance. Dr. George John Bouyoucos of Michigan State College made use of this principle in a handy gadget which tells farmers the moisture content of their fields. Blocks of plaster of Paris the size of safety-match boxes are buried with wires leading to the surface. The wetter the soil, the lower the resistance of the buried blocks. Measurements can be taken by merely hooking the surface wires to a Wheatstone bridge, which measures the electrical resistance. By burying a number of plaster blocks...
...presence of Joe Cook means that the two foremost gadget comedians in the business are on Broadway. The other: Ed Wynn of Boys and Girls Together. If Wynn is a department store of inane machinery, Cook is a Montgomery Ward. He finally appears in a neon-lighted bandmaster's uniform to conduct the 1941 version of his famed Fuller Construction Symphony Orchestra, in which a double hanging leads by various roundabout mechanics to the tinkling of a drummer's triangle...
...Wilhelmstrasse sidewalks outside Adolf Hitler's gadget-ridden Chancellery are a number of vast covered pits. From four of them slabs of cement rise and part, and out push anti-aircraft guns. One other is a huge elevator which swallows into the Chancellery's great catacombs anything from a bicycle to a ten-ton tank. Every evening last week, as dusk rubbed out the building's heroic contours, a bus drove up on the sidewalk and disappeared into the ground...
...less remarkable than this gadget is the small, grey man who thought it up-Professor Frederick Kurt Kirsten of the University of Washington. Born in Saxon Germany 55 years ago, Frederick Kirsten once terrified the town of Grossenhain by enveloping it in a smoke screen, ran away to sea at 17 in a three-masted windjammer, jumped ship in Tacoma with $1.50 in his pocket. He first sought shelter with a farmer whose daughter he eventually married. Someone persuaded him to enter the University of Washington. He worked his way through the school of electrical engineering, putting in eight hours...
Convention. National Defense and international affairs kept him in Washington but he was not too busy to follow the Convention day & night by radio. Even in his office he kept a gadget pocket radio open on his desk. When the Convention sank into confusion after its spiritless opening, he talked long with Harry Hopkins in Chicago, used the direct wire from the White House to confer long with Senators Byrnes and Barkley. When Alabama's Lister Hill, with lamenting tremolos and quaverollos in his voice, placed the name of Franklin Roosevelt in nomination, no sign or word betrayed Franklin...