Word: plastic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Harvard to Hollywood. Edwin ("Din") Land, now a handsome, boyish-looking 46, was a physics student at Harvard when he quit to form his own company in 1932 to market his first major invention, a plastic that filters the glare out of light rays. During World War II, Polaroid Corp. did a $16 million-a-year business making glare-proof gunsights and sunglasses and other products for the armed forces. But by 1948 gross sales were down to $1,481,372 (net loss: $865,256). Land's camera snapped Polaroid into the black again (1949 profit...
Gold is the label, red and black the hinged cardboard box. Inside, recipients of this Christmas package will find two bestsellers: a King James Bible in imitation leather, zippered open and shut with a plastic ball containing a mustard seed;* a red and gold imitation leather copy of The Power of Positive Thinking by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Price of this Treasury of Faith: $6.95. "There is no substitute for the Bible," writes Dr. Peale on the box, but it is clear which book he expects people to read first. "I hope that readers will be encouraged," he adds...
Symphony, he paces about his penthouse with lips clamped in the expression of the well-known bust in the music room; but somehow, with his fluttery dimples and impetuous curls, he looks rather more like a pink plastic dolly with built-in colic...
Thirty Seconds. From the tapered tip of its special plastic radar nose that gives the 116-ft. Columbine an eye on weather 200 miles ahead to the specially rubberized presidential escape chute that makes for cooler slides to the ground after a forced landing, the fussed-over plane is thoroughly checked after every 50 hours in the air. The four turbo-compound engines of ordinary Super Constellations are overhauled at the 1,200-hour mark; Columbine's get torn apart after 600 hours...
...flying White House. To its chief passengers, the President and Mrs. Eisenhower, the entire rear third of the plane is devoted. There a softly muted green-"Eisenhower green"-strikes a note of easy relaxation: grey-green carpets on the floors, rich green gabardine on the walls, white vinyl plastic on the ceiling. In the spacious stateroom, with its bleached walnut woodwork and grey-green-striped boucle upholstery, the Eisenhowers may fasten themselves with green safety belts into two big green swivel chairs, gazing out at blue sky through green-curtained windows. At night they may retire on the two wide...