Word: gadget
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...young Diesel, sent him, after graduation, to work at the Linde factory in Paris. In a few months Diesel was acting as engineer, manager, inventor, patent expert, purchasing agent. He began to take out patents of his own-one for a means of making "clear ice," another for a gadget to make ice on the dinner table, in a carafe...
What these fishermen saw was the U. S. Navy's newest gadget: its growing squadron of motor torpedo boats, getting a sea test in rough water. Returning to the Brooklyn Navy Yard at nightfall each day with his five waterbugs, handsome Lieut. Earl Stevens Caldwell, youngest (and lowest-ranking) squadron commander in the Navy, was able to put down a favorable report. The new PTs (patrol torpedo boats) were as seaworthy as the designer of their prototype, famed Britisher Hubert Scott-Paine, had said they were. In 15-ft. waves they charged along at 40 knots, in smooth seas...
...Plaster of Paris absorbs moisture, and the wetter it gets, the lower its electrical resistance. Dr. George John Bouyoucos of Michigan State College made use of this principle in a handy gadget which tells farmers the moisture content of their fields. Blocks of plaster of Paris the size of safety-match boxes are buried with wires leading to the surface. The wetter the soil, the lower the resistance of the buried blocks. Measurements can be taken by merely hooking the surface wires to a Wheatstone bridge, which measures the electrical resistance. By burying a number of plaster blocks...
...presence of Joe Cook means that the two foremost gadget comedians in the business are on Broadway. The other: Ed Wynn of Boys and Girls Together. If Wynn is a department store of inane machinery, Cook is a Montgomery Ward. He finally appears in a neon-lighted bandmaster's uniform to conduct the 1941 version of his famed Fuller Construction Symphony Orchestra, in which a double hanging leads by various roundabout mechanics to the tinkling of a drummer's triangle...
...Wilhelmstrasse sidewalks outside Adolf Hitler's gadget-ridden Chancellery are a number of vast covered pits. From four of them slabs of cement rise and part, and out push anti-aircraft guns. One other is a huge elevator which swallows into the Chancellery's great catacombs anything from a bicycle to a ten-ton tank. Every evening last week, as dusk rubbed out the building's heroic contours, a bus drove up on the sidewalk and disappeared into the ground...