Word: rheostat
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...testing," Audience Research will use the Hopkins Televote Machine, a Rube Goldbergian contrivance originally designed to chart audience reaction to movies (TIME, July 22, 1946). By turning a rheostat, hand-picked audiences indicate their degree of amusement from "very dull" to "like very much." Promising movies have a high "Want-to-See." Radio shows will get a "Want-to-Hear" rating...
Before the performer, in the spot that would be occupied by a piano keyboard, is a cloth-covered fingerboard about three feet long and three inches wide. This is a rheostat. By pressing the finger on it at any given point, the player controls the amount of electricity that goes into the instrument's generator tube. Depending on the amount of current that goes into one of the grids of the tube, the vibration frequency which controls the pitch is changed up & down...
...racing game was one of his most famed. It occupied an entire floor of his studio. The miniature race track was 20 feet long, lined with real grandstands. Twenty mechanical horses ran at one time, drawn by invisible threads from specially built, sensitive electric motors. Each motor had a rheostat, for speed variations. When a race was about to begin the rheostats were set so that each horse would travel at a speed proportionate to its "past performance record" (.0 to 1,000). Then a so-called Chance Machine distributed ball bearings so that ten added impulses were given haphazardly...
...patient 3,000 miles away. For best results the samples must be taken under certain prescribed conditions?dim light, no red in room, patient facing west! The specimens are placed on aluminum electrodes in a small, round box called a "dynamizer," connected by an elaborate wiring system with a "rheostat dynamizer" for amplifying the reactions, a " vibratory rate rheostat" and a "measuring rheostat" for determining the wave rate "ohmage" of the specimen. These are connected to an electrode on the forehead of a healthy human being, called the " re-agent," who stands stripped to the waist and barefooted...