Word: gadgets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week the Weather Bureau was readying an array of new gadgets to track a storm like a beagle after a bunny. Stimulated by the many reports of large flocks of birds trapped in the eye of a hurricane, unable to escape against the strong winds blowing toward its center, the Weather Bureau has devised a balloon that keeps itself floating in air of a specified barometric pressure. Released from a hurricane-scouting aircraft, it should follow along at a constant barometric pressure, trapped in the eye like the birds, broadcasting radio signals that tell the hurricane watchers how fast...
...where the particles go and how they interact with atoms in the ether. When Inventor Glaser delivered his classic paper at a Washington physics convention. Physicist Luis Alvarez, associate director of the Radiation Lab, was not in the audience. He was at the White House delivering a strobo-scopic gadget he had invented to improve President Eisenhower's golf game. But Alvarez knew about the Glaser paper, and had plans for improvements. The best liquid to use, he thought, was not ether; it was pure liquid hydrogen, which contains no carbon or oxygen atoms to confuse researchers...
...Cover) In the uneasy years before the start of World War II, a Navy destroyer nosed through the warm waters off Guantanamo, Cuba. An experimental sonar gadget pinged steadily. It had worked perfectly on other occasions. But here in the Trop ics, it saw targets that were not there...
...Navy's trouble. It was just a question of temperatures, they explained. Tropical sun had heated the water to a depth of 50 ft. The sound waves were bent by this temperature gradient, hiding a sub as effectively as if it were behind a hill. Equipped with a gadget of Woods Hole's devising, a bathythermograph, many a U.S. sub saved itself during World War II by finding a temperature "hill" in the ocean and slip ping behind...
...boat shop. In 1896, two years after his success with his first naphtha-gas boat, he and Hank tried a 2-h.p. Sintz gasoline engine. "It never ran well," says Chris's son Jay, 74, "until Charles Sintz showed up from Grand Rapids two years later with a gadget he called a carburetor...