Word: gray
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...first new Pragma A-3000. The $110,000 robot, which has just been licensed by General Electric, is assembling a compressor valve unit from twelve separate parts. Its two arms can do totally different jobs at once. When it picks up a slightly defective gasket in its gray steel claw, it immediately senses something wrong, flicks the gasket to one side and picks up another. The Pragma produces 320 units an hour, without mistakes, and it can labor tirelessly for 24 hours a day. That makes it roughly the equivalent of ten human workers. Furthermore, it can easily be reprogrammed...
...button marked REQUEST TRANSFER. Behind a 10-in.-thick concrete wall, a pair of claws reaches out to grasp a stainless steel container filled with pink powder, then lifts it into a furnace where it is baked at 950° F until it turns into a nondescript gray button three inches in diameter. Such a button could be worth $100,000, for the job of this robot, which goes into regular operation in a few months, is transporting reprocessed plutonium, one of the most toxic substances known to man. Until now, this dangerous task has been done...
...Lockheed Missiles and Space Co., engineers are already pushing one step further into a technique called "gray-imaging." Similar to Rosen's system but more elaborate, the Lockheed method uses a camera image that contains 100,000 different dots, each graded from 0 for pure white to 255 for pure black. The different shades of gray give the robot a much clearer three-dimensional view of what it is confronting...
...still dresses in the gray three-piece suits and plain white shirts he favored for official appearances, but his desk is no longer piled high with scrawl-covered yellow legal pads, news clips, letters, schedules and unanswered telephone messages. With little of substance left to do in his remaining days at the White House, Jody Powell is troubled by a vague sense of failure. Says he: "I don't feel at all satisfied with what I've done. To start with, we lost the election...
...with his mother and his brother Robert, who had been crippled in childhood by cerebral palsy. It was a distinct comedown from his earlier years, when his father (also Joseph), who died in 1917, supported his family in elegance by buying and designing textiles. From that domestic seclusion, the gray and long-beaked man would sally forth on small voyages of discovery: to Central Park in the snow, to Times Square (in the days before it became a rats' alley of pimps and porn), to the now disappearing bric-a-brac shops and bookstalls that used to line Fourth...