Word: inventor
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MATCH UP INVENTION IN COLUMN A WITH INVENTOR IN COLUMN...
UNBREAKABLE BULB INVENTOR: GENERAL ELECTRIC Light bulbs last longer these days, that is, if you can get them into the socket before accidentally breaking their delicate shell. GE's Saf-T-Gard incandescent bulb is the first one that's completely shatterproof. Its Teflon coating means the glass may crack, but the pieces stay together...
...Bush team's second witness of the day, John Ahmann, has the dubious honor of being a consulting inventor of and expert on the infamous Votomatic voting machine. (Just for the record, as Ahmann pointed out in a cantankerous moment, "Everyone keeps calling them voting 'machines' and they're not machines at all. They're 'devices.'" Please make a note...
...small, white pieces of rock produced in lead mining. But what rock and paper have to do with each other (particularly without scissors) is unclear. Another theory, advanced by the New Hacker's Dictionary, is that chad stems from the "Chadless" paper punch, thought to be named after its inventor, that keeps the little pieces off the floor--ergo the pieces must be chad. "There is a legend that the word was originally acronymic," the dictionary adds, "standing for Card Hole Aggregate Debris, but this has all the earmarks of a backronym...
Even so, there are some surprising omissions. The grid city of 19th century Barcelona, designed from the ground up as an ideal townscape by the socialist engineer Ildefons Cerda, is the biggest example of would-be Utopian town design that ever got built--but neither it nor its inventor rates a mention in the catalog...