Word: gadgets
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...first slide fastener. It worked badly, but it made an instantaneous impression upon Colonel Lewis Walker, a lawyer from Meadville, Pa. Colonel Walker spent the next 20 years and about $1,000,000 collected from a multitude of sources, before he began to achieve any commercial success with the gadget. Judson was unable to perfect it and it was not until 1913 that one Gideon Sundback developed the "zipper" as everyone now knows it. Started that year in a $300-a-year shack in Meadville, Hookless Fastener Co., maker of "Talon" fasteners, immediately went to town, is now the biggest...
...last week: "It contains none of the American products famous in France, no motorcars, no silk stockings, no reasonably priced ready-made dresses, no cheap-but-good shoes." Most appreciated exhibit seemed to be the Aetna Life Insurance Co.'s so-called "Steerometer and Reactometer," a gadget on which visitors could test their fitness to drive a car. Unexplained last week was a heavily draped pool table. A bust of John D. Rockefeller Sr. stared at a bust of Mahatma Gandhi by Jo Davidson. On tables were perspective models of Boulder Dam and an artificially moonlit Triborough Bridge, with...
...scene was when he gave exhibition flights over Long Island in one of his own planes in 1911, Skipper Sopwith applied his technique as an aeronaut to sailing when yachts became his hobby in 1928. Having taught himself to navigate, he equipped Endeavour I with every conceivable mechanical gadget except an altimeter. Like Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Sopwith shares her husband's hobby. In addition to christening his boats, she also sails them. In 1934 she acted as timekeeper, often took the helm of Endeavour before and after races. Endeavour I proved herself much faster than Rainbow by winning...
...Newest "Coronation novelties" on sale in London are cakes of bath soap bearing sculptured busts of King George & Queen Elizabeth in bas relief. Hairbrushes similarly adorned were offered, also a bathroom gadget holding side by side a bust of His Majesty and a toothbrush...
Inventor Burt's machine, made entirely of wood, was destroyed in the Patent Office fire of 1836. It was a ponderous gadget with the type carried on a circular frame operated by a lever. That Burt could write faster with his machine than by hand is highly improbable. Yet it had a feature that was lacking in some commercial machines for many years: separate sets of capital and lower-case letters, with a shift mechanism for changing from one to the other...