Word: rubes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...giving low-voltage kicks to moving ions (charged particles), Lawrence calculated that they could be made to whirl progressively faster in a closed chamber, reaching great speed and high voltages. They could then smash atoms and transmute elements. He first demonstrated this phenomenon with a crude but spectacular Rube Goldbergish kit: a kitchen chair, clothes tree, 4-in. electromagnet, pie-sized vacuum chamber made of glass, brass and sealing wax, all put together for $25. When he hooked this odd gizmo up to an ordinary electric socket, atoms whirled around faster than those emitted by radium...
...Army's Jupiter nose cone that was recovered undamaged two weeks ago (TIME, May 26) did not slam down through the atmosphere in a crude and simple manner. Last week Cook Electric Co. of Chicago described the Rube Goldberg-type invention that delivered it to the search parties...
...West, but to Poles, in their dogged, rear-guard struggle for democracy, Szpilki's sharpest needles are reserved for Communist duplicity and doublethink. In a cartoon that wryly helped to explain its own survival, Szpilki showed a technician standing with a visitor in front of a Rube Goldbergian version of an electronic brain. "You think this criticism machine is big?" said the technician. "You should see the anti-criticism machine...
...Rube Goldberg awkwardness of the U.S.'s federal farm programs was revealed once again last week in a problem faced-and solved, after a fashion-by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson. To avert a threatened collapse in hog prices next year, Benson offered to support this year, at $1.10 a bushel, any and all corn grown by Corn Belt farmers who ignored the Agriculture Department's acreage controls (for farmers who complied with controls, the support price is $1.36). He was "sorry," said Benson, but he just had to take the step, because if free-market corn prices...
Free as a Breeze. City Slicker Gay, whose 200-man rural stable brings him more than $1,000,000 a year, found Jimmy five years ago doing a rube comedy act with a fright wig, blacked-out teeth and rouged-in freckles at a rowdy Washington honkytonk, hired him at $64 a week to sing and play his piano, accordion and guitar for U.S. troops in the Caribbean. On his return Jimmy joined several of Gay's corn-fed broadcasting groups and made a howling hillbilly recording called Bumming Around ("I'm free as a breeze...