Word: transistor
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...Athens had its bards. Medieval France had its jongleurs; Elizabethan London, its ballad singers and costermongers. Today, U.S. cities have their street musicians: modern minstrels who weave their fragile melodies over the pedal point of trucks and subways, amid a chorus of honking horns and an obbligato of blaring transistor radios...
...bell, my bell/ Ting-a-ling-a-ling." It is as though the Great God Muzak has berserked out of the dentist's office and run amuck with all his decibels exposed. Actually, the public tranquility is being regularly murdered by that handy modern convenience, the portable transistor radio. Its proliferation is nothing if not phenomenal...
...somewhere in Central Africa. Bowie spits out syllables like gunfire, Eno's crickets' chatter, the band thumps out a halting beat, and Eno chants Swahili in the background. If you heard it on your car radio, you'd probably switch the station, and if you heard it on a transistor radio you'd think you were between stations--but on a good stereo, maybe with headphones, you just might be up there over Mombassa, running guns or running out of fuel...
...reason for America's lag in productivity and gap in balance of payments is that the U.S. has lost much of its lead in innovation. Not in a long time have Yankee tinkerers produced an invention to rival nylon or the transistor. U.S. scientists and engineers have brought forth some fascinating new products, including talking toys and maybe the Moodymobile, but the ingenious Europeans and Asians are being granted an ever increasing share of the patents...
...every point of historical comparison, Iran offers at least one anomalous or unprecedented detail. The role of mass electronics was rather weird, causing the McLuhanesque web to thrum with a new note. Ubiquitous transistor radios and cassette tape recorders with messages relayed over telephone lines to some 9,000 mosques all over Iran allowed a 78-year-old holy man camped in a Paris suburb to direct a revolution 2,600 miles away like a company commander assaulting a hill...