Word: mirroring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nearly broke, Karl at last hit on the magic combination of mirrors that had eluded other inventors who had thought of the same basic idea. He bought a '61 white Corvette, built a new top for it, incorporating the mirror, and drove it down to Los Angeles expecting to astound the world. It was indeed a wonderful mirror, making driving many times safer and easier. But all Karl got was one small article in the Los Angeles Times. Then he tried writing letters to all the Senators and Congressmen he had heard of and to 17 federal agencies. Nothing...
...because his Corvette has no rear window, the better to demonstrate the virtues of his device. Once a highway patrolman drew his gun on Karl and searched the car, explaining that cars without rear windows generally had machine guns in the back. At the hearings, Karl testified about his mirror, but no one seemed to listen...
...Karl drove doggedly on to Detroit, getting arrested again on the way, and challenged the automakers to match safety mirrors with his. Four auto companies examined it, eventually turned it down. Karl was despairing when the Department of Transportation was founded. He flew back to Washington and explained his mirror to DOT. But the department seemed uninterested also...
...years were rolling by, and Karl had about given up, when DOT commissioned a research firm in Santa Monica to test the leading safety-mirror concepts. Karl's invention was among them. The report, which came out last year, said: "There is no vehicle on the road which permits maneuvers such as freeway lane changes and merges to be made as quickly, safely and with such a high degree of assurance as does the Smith car." As a result, there is a chance that a Santa Barbara firm, under contract to DOT, will build a prototype of Karl...
Humor is civil war, even to the point of paralysis, between the part of man who wants to play God and the part of man who knows a real God when he sees one-and he is not that pompous character staring back from the mirror with egg stains on his shirt and his fly half-zipped, asking "What's so funny...