Word: inventors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Billy Mays knew how to sell. He was the consummate pitchman, rising from boardwalks to state fairs to short-form direct-response ads. By the time he died of heart disease on June 28 at 50, he was on television more than 400 times a week. To an aspiring inventor or an entrepreneur, his oratory was the difference between a pipe dream and a blockbuster...
...safe to say that after more than a decade honing his characters on television and in films, Baron Cohen is more than a comedian. He's the world's most famous performance artist, the inventor of a perfect hybrid of documentary and mockumentary, reality TV and psychodrama, Jackass and Andy Kaufman. When he gets the mixture just right, he creates situations of unbearable tension that at the same time turn out to be unbearably funny. For instance, at one point Brüno does a Madonna/Angelina, coming back from Africa with a baby. Then he appears as a guest...
...Using a mattress, a coin meter and a clip-on vibrating device, in 1958 inventor John Houghtaling, 92, created his most famous product: the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed. Billed as a sleep aid, the machine was a staple of U.S. motels in the 1960s...
That skepticism seemed fair based on early attempts. In 1884, a German inventor created crude moving images by filtering light through a spinning disk punched with holes. In the early 1920s, engineers in the U.S. and U.K. sent still pictures and moving silhouettes using radio waves. In 1928, General Electric broadcast the first TV drama: a modified small spinning disk and bright lamp produced off-center, blurry pictures of cigarette-toting actors gallivanting around what was supposed to be Europe (but was actually Schenectady, N.Y.). It was one of the best offerings at the time. Other must-see TV included...
What was that like, when you realized that people were taking your idea and running with it? At first there was a false blush of inventor's pride. But the more it started to spread, the more I realized that I hadn't invented anything at all. I had "invented" this really simple way for people to disrupt the flow of the city that they lived in. I had no ownership at all for what they were doing. The funny experience was, after a while, once it started spreading beyond anything I could imagine, I actually felt like as much...