Word: rubes
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...orbit in the new world of pharmaceuticals. Three months ago the company brought out an appetite-suppressing prescription drug, Pre-Sate, which has already taken a substantial bite of that $60 million-a-year market. This month it won five U.S. patents on a "Robot Chemist," a Rube-Goldberg-like device that automatically analyzes up to 120 samples per hour of anything from blood to industrial oil by mixing them with laboratory reagents, measuring the resulting chemical change, and recording the results on adding-machine tape or computer cards. Now the company is beginning national distribution of a new shampoo...
...Erie Canal was completed in 1827, Niagara Falls became the first frontier town on the way West. By the time the New York Central came in 1858, it was one of the rip-roaringest burgs in the U.S. Floozies and fakes, barkers and con men made the Niagara the rube's Rubicon. "Indian chiefs"-chiefly from Ireland-plied a brisk trade in white pebbles, which they hawked as "congealed Niagara spray." The cries of "hackmen, photographers and vendors of gimcracks," wrote a horrified Henry James, "at times drown out the thunder of the cataract...
...ducted 7-ft. fans that the X-22A uses as props are a futuristic blend of modern metallurgy and plastic engineering-fiber-glass blades with steel cores and nickel edges. The power behind those fans is a Rube Goldberg blend of engineering-four turbojet engines feeding a total of ten different gearboxes. The barrel-like ducts, along with their -big props, can be rotated by separate hydraulic motors. With the ducts horizontal and the props pointing forward, the X-22A should be capable of more than 300 m.p.h. in level flight; with ducts rotated to a vertical position, the ship...
...four. The second hole was practically a carbon copy of the first:his drive landed behind a tree, his second shot found a trap-and he still got a par. On and on he went, playing as if he had taken lessons from Rube Goldberg-straying down an adjoining fairway on the eighth, bouncing his ball off a tree on the 15th, dumping his drive into loose sod on the 16th. Scores: two pars and a birdie. On the par-three 17th hole, Nichols "squirreled" his No. 2 iron tee shot off to his right and overhit his wedge recovery...
That was his passport to the comic strips, and no man ever stayed longer or showed more zany inventiveness. The Rube Goldberg machines, a byproduct of his engineering background, made him rich and world-famous. All his designs were models of ludicrous ingenuity. In his automatic stamp-licker, a dwarf robot overturned a can of ants onto a page of postage stamps, gum side up; then they were licked up by an anteater that had been starved for three days...