Word: phonograph
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...officer in the Imperial German-Navy, young Niemöller had thrilled to Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, played on the ship's phonograph while torpedoes from his submarine tore the bottoms from Allied ships. When Hitler rose to power, Niemöller rejected Nazi racism, but accepted the bulk of Nazi authoritarian. doctrine, and did not rebel until Hitler encroached on his church. His defiance cost him eight years in Hitler's concentration camps. Yet, twice during his internment-which earned him a reputation as Protestantism's outstanding martyr to the Nazis-Niemöller unsuccessfully...
...dips deeply into his reservoirs of energy, belligerency and profanity when dealing with these forces of evil, but he does so with a comparatively relaxed air-something like a lion-tamer lobbing house cats into the chandelier of a Sunday morning. His real enemies are the phonograph record and its cousins, the motion picture sound track and the radio station turntable. He is mortally afraid that without James Caesar Petrillo, all the music in the U.S. would eventually be produced by one non-union musician playing a musical comb into a microphone...
...change began with the phonograph. The machine which Edison invented in 1877 was an impractical toy which, as its needle scratched a cylinder of tin foil, made noises like a man strangling to death. The commercial "gramophones" which followed (colloquially called screech boxes) were not much better. But the early disc phonographs, which delivered both Caruso and Cohen on the Telephone, were too delightful to be resisted. The speed with which they became a national obsession was reflected by the financial statements of the Victor Talking Machine Co., which did $500 worth of business in 1901 and $12 million...
...days after G.E.'s announcement, Teletone and Trav-ler put out their new $9.95 sets. Emerson Radio & Phonograph Corp., the largest maker of small sets in the industry, came out with a 1948 list that showed some impressive price cuts. Its cheapest model was down 20% to $16.95; and it hoped to hold on to the middle-bracket market with a combination radio phonograph at $99.95 and a four-tube A.M.-P.M. set at $49.95 (almost a 50% cut from last year...
...Army taught thousands of G.I.s-to speak foreign languages-even "unspeakable" ones like Thai. Its secret weapon was a phonograph with made-to-order records. Old-style language teachers scoffed at the Army method, even after the Army method worked. It wasn't the records that brought results; they claimed; it was the intensive, purposeful way the G.I.s studied, and the small-size classes they studied in. But when the Army released the records for civilian use, educators were among those who scrambled to buy them...