Word: tinfoil
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...been almost completely deaf: he perfected the phonograph in 1887 because his own faulty hearing made him fascinated by the science of sound. His invention so fascinated the public that in those early years audiences sat for whole evenings in stunned silence listening to the tinfoil phonograph crow like a cock, bark like a dog or babble in foreign tongues. Later, the German Pianist-Conductor Hans von Bulow was so moved by Edison's handiwork that when he heard a recording of himself playing a Chopin mazurka, he fainted dead away. In the early days Columbia slipped commercials...
...record business is having its best year since Thomas A. Edison first captured the human voice on a tinfoil-covered cylinder. This week RCA Victor announced its alltime high advance sale for a single pressing-more than 1,000,000 copies of Rock 'n' Roll Hero Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender, a surprisingly restrained love ballad that was just released. The Record Industry Association of America estimated that U.S. record sales have jumped 30% over last year's $225 million. The total may approach $300 million with the Christmas rush...
...generations of sleuthing. Until 1905, even the whereabouts of John Paul Jones's corpse was a mystery. After his death in Paris from nephritis in 1792, the body of the Scot who fathered the U.S. Navy was prepared for shipment to the U.S. The limbs were encased in tinfoil; the body was wrapped in a shroud and then was placed in a sealed, straw-and alcohol-filled lead casket. But the U.S. frugally refused to pay the freight. Hero Jones was unceremoniously buried in Paris' obscure St. Louis Cemetery, where he lay undisturbed, despite sporadic efforts over...
...election of Michigan's Truman Newberry in 1918, for example, lit a bonfire that was to burn in the Senate for four years, and finally became a major factor in the Democrats' success in the 1922 Congressional elections. Newberry, it seems, was guilty of passing out cigars wrapped in tinfoil and $10 bills. No-one would have been outraged if he had distributed them democratically, but unfortunately the Senator gave the tinfoiled cigars to known Democrats, while the $10 variety went to Republican and undecided voters. The Senate, furthermore, chose not to accept Newberry's plea that he was educating...
...Hanley fought his way topside, he saw steel bulkheads crumpled like tinfoil. Radiating out from the vicinity of the catapult room, the blast had smashed and seared its way through the forward part of the ship-through the junior officers' wardroom, where pilots lounged over an early cup of coffee; through the enlisted men's mess hall, and on into the enlisted sleeping quarters, where many a sailor was just blinking his eyes and wondering what the bonging call to general quarters was all about...