Word: problem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...problem was that for too long they worked on only one model. Although people told him to diversify, Henry Ford had developed tunnel vision. He basically started saying "to hell with the customer," who can have any color as long as it's black. He didn't bring out a new design until the Model A in '27, and by then GM was gaining...
...conditioning did not begin life as a cooling system for homes and offices. Nor did it begin life as a system. Carrier's first customer, in 1902, was a business with a production problem: a frustrated printer in Brooklyn whose color reproductions kept messing up because changes in humidity and temperature made his paper expand and contract, causing a lot of ugly color runs...
Carrier could solve this problem by controlling humidity. But in '06, a cotton mill in South Carolina gave him a new challenge--heat. "When I saw 5,000 spindles spinning so fast and getting so hot that they'd cause a bad burn when touched several minutes after shutdown, I realized our humidifier was too small...
...industrial challenge after another led Carrier to make refinement after refinement in his systems. In the early days of Carrier Corp., one of its testing grounds was wet macaroni. The company had guaranteed a pastamaker it could fix a moisture problem. Suddenly there were 10,000 lbs. of macaroni on the floor, in millions of bits, none of it drying worth a damn. The Chief was called in. The Chief arrived. Long trip, cleanup at the hotel, dinner, back to the macaroni factory. All night long, The Chief paced, The Chief thought, The Chief would suddenly leap up and march...
Animation was as well a form that placed a premium on technical problem solving, which was absorbing but not emotionally demanding. Best of all, an animated cartoon constituted a little world all its own--something that, unlike life, a man could utterly control. "If he didn't like an actor, he could just tear him up," an envious Alfred Hitchcock would later remark...