Word: tubefuls
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...transistor was developed only eight years ago by three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories. It amplifies electrical impulses just like the vacuum tube, but is free of the vacuum tube's limitations-fragility, bulkiness, high power consumption, short life. The transistor needs no warmup time, saves space, weight, heat and power, lasts 150 times as long, uses as little as one-thousandth the electric current...
...reactors, for instance, can turn into radioactive junk in a fraction of a second. To avoid such misadventures, most modern mechanical and electronic systems are equipped with built-in monitors that watch their operation and shut them down promptly at the first sign of trouble. But if a vacuum tube or relay in the monitor fails, the main machine is like a building whose night watchman has dropped dead. Trouble can start and get out of hand with no one to correct it or give the alarm...
Your critic's verbal sideswipe was obviously an attempt at tin-pot philosophy, concocted from a vacant mind and a typewriter with keys. Has he ever been drunk for 16 years? Has he ever had to fight with anything outside of an empty tube of toothpaste...
...tomorrow's President will not be elected by the people, nor by old-line machine bosses like The Last Hurrah's Frank Skeffington (see above), but by slick advertising boys on Madison Avenue. A candidate will be pretested and merchandised like "a can of beer, a squeeze tube of deodorant, a can of dog food...
...musical instrument that makes a buzzing sound when one hums into the tube...