Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ingenious gadget, forbiddingly named the ophthalmodynamometer, has recently been devised to help in diagnosis. If blood flow through the internal ophthalmic artery is cut off, the eye on that side loses its vision. The doctor presses against the eyeball with the ophthalmodynamometer until the patient reports that he cannot see out of that eye. The instrument registers the pressure at which vision was cut off. This in turn indicates the pressure in the internal carotid artery and shows whether that vessel is dangerously narrowed. If it is, a DeBakey operation may prove to be the answer...
...absurd rhyme gives it the sound of a jingle thought up by the College outline series as a mnemonic gadget for students who must know the philosopher's main preoccupations. Even at that, it is confused and ineffectual. When I learn of belief clattering, I want to know more, to hear the clatter more distinctly; instead I am handed myth swooning, a concept at least equally vacuous...
...Triumph of the injection-molder's art is Jimmy Jet, a dial-laden gadget that looks like a cross between a 1958 Pontiac dash board and the cockpit of the U-2-and is nearly as big. Activate its batteries and an aerial view of a terrain nicely dotted with factories, bridges and other targets moves across a simulated TV screen; a silhouette of a plane also appears, and by turning the controls this can be made to pass "over" a target. A lever launches missiles from the cowling. More dazzling than durable, it is sold in supermarkets exclusively...
When an underground gas main springs a leak, the break may not be found before enough gas has escaped to explode with devastating force. All over the U.S., gas companies are constantly on the alert for any gadget capable of pinpointing a small leak before it balloons into a big blowup...
...Harvard researchers used their gadget first on a patient who had just had twelve AC shocks at 25 volts with no result. The DC machine worked promptly, and it has now been used successfully on more than 30 patients. In two cases, it did its job when the electrodes were merely applied to the skin-suggesting widespread value for countless patients whose episodes of fibrillation have nothing to do with surgery...