Word: though
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...telecommunications equipment provided a comfortable trade surplus. But since the early '70s foreign manufacturers have strongly challenged American industrial products, and the U.S. has been suffering increasingly severe trade deficits, thus weakening the dollar. It is all too easy to blame the trade deficit on skyrocketing oil prices, though they are a major cause; Japan, which must import all its oil, has maintained a trade surplus by developing high-technology products and aggressively selling them abroad. A prime example: every one of the million video tape recorders sold in the U.S.-including those marketed under American labels-was developed...
...biggest problem in the U.S. is not the lack of inventive capacity but the lack of businessmen willing to take the risk investments." The bottom-line obsession of many managers results in quick payoff investments to retool old products rather than expensive long-term spending to develop new ones. Though Texas Instruments this year will spend $155 million on research, Vice President George Heilmeier admits: "We have become conservative and spend less on basic research...
Some entrepreneurs also complain that corporate giants are indifferent to small projects. Harris J. Bixler, president of Boston's Avco Everett Research Laboratory, contends that new products that promise tidy but unextravagant revenues go unsupported by Big Business even though the initial investment might be low. Says he: "Large companies could care less about the guy who has a $100,000 idea. They'd lose that in the paper-clip account." Such technological triumphs as Xerography and Polaroid film were developed by small innovator-entrepreneurs only after larger firms turned down the ideas...
...Thomas Alva Edison was also the 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...
...inventions in a social and commercial context. He drew up lists of inventions that the world needed, or at least would buy, and set out to produce them. In the case of electric light, gas was already lighting homes, and electric arc lights were illuminating streets and stores-though much too brilliantly, and expensively, for general use. The need, Edison saw, was for some other form of electric illumination that would provide a steadier and, above all, cheaper glow than...