Word: patently
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Bill Bailey ought to know. Born in 1886, the son of a patent-medicine hawker, he learned song-and-dance routines to help sell the family product: Bailey's Gypsy Liniment. At 120-proof, the stuff worked like magic. Later, in vaudeville, Bill hoofed up with a singer named Dave Hodges, who changed his name to Barnum so the pair could work their way around the country as Bailey & Barnum. They were a sort of circus minimus until a Manhattan impresario gave them a five-minute spot in Fred and Adele Astaire's Lady, Be Good. The playbill...
...prewar movie sound technician who in 1948 set up what is now the Sony Corp. to make tape recorders and other sound equipment. Hearing of the development of transistors at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Ibuka produced laboratory samples, brought them to the U.S. to arrange the first Japanese transistor-patent licensing agreement. While many U.S. electronics men concentrated on industrial and military uses of transistors. Ibuka went after the consumer market, started the Japanese fad for miniature radios, eventually attracted some 100 competitors into the field...
...Blackymor," he was a scarred African Negro called James Montgomery-Majoribanks, who traveled about western Ireland peddling patent medicine. White hired the medicine man, who doubles as a masseur, to unstiffen the rusted joints of two rheumatic old villagers. The healing scene is comical, but writing of it, White manages to convey the dignity of the two crippled ancients and the courage of the lonely, ridiculous African. The story ends with a clink and a gurgle. "Our faces glowing with liquor, our eyes more flashing, our tongues volubly tripping and repeating, we had great concert of talk and narrative, admiring...
Until the revenuers struck, Slenderella's fast-talking President Lawrence Mack, 40, had shown a nice talent for handling complaints. A former general manager for big Stauffer Reducing Inc., he fought off a patent infringement suit by Stauffer after he set up Slenderella with a reducing table similar to Stauffer's. He also shook off a campaign by the Better Business Bureau against his "misleading advertising," which promised that size 20s would be squeezed down to size 14s. Mack promoted Slenderella with TV and radio spots, built up sales to more than $20 million in seven years, held...
...Great-grandson of Patent Medicinist Lydia Pinkham...