Word: system
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dressed in somber gray suits and minus 25 Ibs. (thanks to a low-fat diet), he stressed pet schemes: overhaul the fiscal and monetary system, rebuild the cities, renew the space program, balance the federal budget, protect the environment, phase out nuclear energy. Says Brown: "The Democratic Party is headed for defeat in November unless it comes up with the answers for the decline in our economy, the decline of our technology...
...most prolific inventor who ever lived; without his gadgets modern life would be inconceivable. The phonograph, the movie camera, the microphone, the mimeograph, the stock ticker-they only begin the list. Though Alexander Graham Bell devised the first telephone transmitter and receiver, it was Edison who worked out a system of reproducing phone conversations over long distances loudly enough that they could be heard easily, and who may have been the first to shout "hello" into a telephone mouthpiece. His one discovery in basic science-the "Edison effect," the emission of electrons from a heated electric conductor-led eventually...
Above all, Edison invented the first practical electric light, and a power-distribution system that put it cheaply into every home. Like much else about Edison, the precise date is in dispute, but the inventor himself remembered Oct. 21, 1879, as the day on which he began the test of the first successful light bulb...
...between the bulbs that, Edison's partisans say, made his superior. For example, Swan's carbon rod was fairly thick, Edison's filament was thin. But a crucial difference was that Swan stopped with inventing the bulb, while Edison took what would now be called a "systems approach"; he saw that the bulb had to be only one of a whole series of inventions. To make it in the first place, he and his assistants had to produce a more complete vacuum than had ever been known before. Then they had to devise a power-distribution system...
...Justice for All may be the worst thing to happen to Baltimore since the War of 1812. If this movie is to be believed, Maryland's largest city has a legal system that would make a police state seem appealing. The judges are all psychotic or perverts or worse; the lawyers are all self-serving hypocrites; the cops all regard suspects as "scum." When criminals go to jail-usually on trumped-up charges-they invariably get murdered shortly after incarceration. Indeed, if the American hero of Midnight Express had come from Baltimore, there would have been no reason...