Word: spectro
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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M.I.T. has become a place for differential analyzers, spectro-photometers, oscillographs and thryatron tubes. Out of its laboratories it has managed to produce such unexpected specimens as Humorist Gelett Burgess and Author Stuart Chase. But M.I.T.'s alumni are more apt to be of another sort: Donald Douglas of Douglas Aircraft, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors, Gerard Swope of General Electric, and at least ten Du Fonts...
...gadget was as flashy as a jukebox, and paid off even better. It was called the "Spectro-Chrome." A 1,000-watt bulb was propped up in the back of it, shining through red, yellow, green, blue and violet panes of glass. The instructions that came with the box reflected sunny assurance: it would "measure and restore radioactive and radio-emitive equilibrium by attuned color waves." It would also cure all diseases that man is heir...
...lemon; syphilis, by two weeks of green plus four weeks of lemon. No matter what was the matter with them, said the gadget's inventor, patients should sleep with their heads pointed north, give up meat, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, and stare at the Spectro-Chrome...
Gold in a Gadget. The Spectro-Chrome (TIME, June 2, 1947) soon became a million-dollar business for white-goateed, bespectacled Dinshah Pestanji Framji Ghadiali, born in Bombay 74 years ago and a naturalized U.S. citizen* since 1917. Since 1920 he has sold at least 10,000 memberships at $90 apiece (recently hiked to $100) in his "Spectro-Chrome Institute." Members got the machine, plus a "favorscope" which tells the best time for starting treatment; for $3.50 a year they could get up-to-date guidance from Ghadiali; for another $10, they could get new panes if the old ones...
Search for the Gullible. Last week Food & Drug agents moved in on the block-long institute building at Malaga, N.J., impounded every Spectro-Chrome in the place. Then they trucked five tons of Ghadiali's instructions, magazines and correspondence to the Camden city incinerator. The FDA has also filed 25 suits to recover other known machines elsewhere, but has no idea how many others are still...