1960s

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Strong, C.L., 1960. “Some months ago I added a gadget to the tunnel which considerably broadens its utility as a scientific tool. This consists simply of an electric door bell (with the gong removed) and a chamber with a diaphragm inserted in the smoke circuit just ahead of the ‘rake.’ When properly adjusted, the door-bell-and-diaphragm assembly acts as a chopper to send the smoke out into the tunnel in small puffs or pulses instead of in a continuous stream”

Newman, James R., 1960. “Wiener is a fluent writer, but this is not much of a novel. It has some merit as social criticism, it describes ingeniously the technical stuff (control gadgetry) and the patent and corporate chicaneries one can get away with in our society, but the hero is a cold fish, a sort of Armenian trader whom one never gets either to like or to understand.”

Blackett, P.M.S., 1960. “Never have Snow’s twin warnings, of the danger of thinking that one weapon will solve our problems, and of the illusion that one can rely on maintaining technical superiority, been more vividly illustrated by the early years of nuclear weapons. Here the euphoria both of gadgets and of secrecy reached their highest and most disastrous intensity. Through a blind obeisance to a single weapon the West let down the strength of its conventional forces and failed even to develop prototypes of modern weapons for land warfare.”

Butterfield, Herbert, 1960. “The first of the sciences to be placed on a modern footing––that of anatomy–– was one which the artists cultivated and which was governed by direct observation. It was the artists who even set up the cry that one must not be satisfied to learn from the ancients or to take everything from books; one must examine nature for oneself. The artists were often the engineers, the designers of fortifications, the inventors of gadgets; they were nearer to the artisan than were the scholars, and their studios often had the features of a laboratory or workshop. […] Science and craftsmanship, combined with the state of the market, enabled them, however, to indulge their zeal for gadgets, mechanical improvements and inventions.”

, 1960. “He spends his time inventing and has a gadget to make newspaper reading on the subway easier, about ready to market.”

Tuskegee Institute, Ala;, 1960. “Because she hated to hear her favorite surgeon grumble, Registered Nurse Meloneze Robinson, above, became an inventor. / “Why,” asked Dr. Asa Yancey, also shown, each time he was to perform an amputation, “doesn’t someone devise a simple method to keep the patient’s limb immobile during the operation?” / At her post at the Tuskegee Veterans Administration hospital, Staff Nurse Robinson devised the first amputation surgery limb support, shown above. Dr. Yancey was the first to use the gadget after it was patented after two years work, $800 and tons of anxiety. It has been used over 40 times at Tuskegee by surgeons and may possibly quiet the grumblings of many physicians across the country when it is marketed this year.”

Garrett, Randall, 1960. “I had made this gadget – it was a toy for children as far as I was concerned. I didn’t have any idea of its worth. It was just a little gadget that hopped up into the air and floated down again. Cute, but worthless, except as a novelty. And it was too expensive to build it as a novelty. So I forgot about it.”

Clifton, Mark, 1960. “” Yehudi is already at the door, “ she said, and made a face of exasperation. “ Someday I’m going to turn off the gadget that signals the orderly room the minute you get out of bed, so I can have you all to myself. “ “ It’s better if you get used to him, “ Cal cautioned. “ Turn off the signal and that turns on an alarm. Instead of one Yehudi, you’d have twenty rushing in to see what was wrong. “ “ Well, it seems to me a grown man ought to be able to take his morning shower without an observer standing by to see that…”

Harrison, Harry, 1960. “” This is the secret of the power holster, “ Brucco said, tapping the flexible cable. “ It is perfectly loose while you are using the weapon. But when you want it returned to the holster – “ Brucco made an adjustment and the cable became a stiff rod that whipped the gun from Jason’s hand and suspended it in midair. “ Then the return. “ The rod-cable whirred and snapped the gun back into the holster. “ The drawing action is the opposite of this, of course. “ “ A great gadget, “ Jason said, “ but how do I draw? Do I whistle or something for the gun to pop out? “ “ No, it is not sonic control, “ Brucco answered with a sober face. “ It is much more precise than that. Here, take your left hand and grasp an imaginary gun butt. Tense your trigger finger. Do you notice the pattern of the tendons in the wrist? Sensitive actuators touch the tendons in your right wrist.”

Leiber, Fritz, 1960. “Somehow the gun had managed to melt itself in the moment of its owner dying. Well, at any rate that showed it hadn’t contained any gunpowder or ordinary chemical explosives, though I already knew it operated on other principles from the way it had been used to paralyze me. More to the point, it showed that the gun’s owner was the member of a culture that believed in taking very complete precautions against its gadgets falling into the hands of strangers.”

Davenport, Marcia, 1960. “There is nothing so dangerous to a whole nation than a tribe of idle women busying themselves with projects’ of one sort or another. I’d like to hang the men who invented automatic washing machines and other gadgets! Now the majority of people don’t have homes; they have housing’ for electrical equipment which gives them more time – more time for what? Mischief. No wonder we have the problem of juvenile delinquency.”

Kenney, Nathaniel T., 1960. “I saw meanness, nobility, comedy. And tragedy. At first the blazing vitality and power of Africa in ferment frightened me. Amid insistent elbows I knew claustrophobia. But faces go with elbows, and many faces smiled and spoke kind words. These are my fellow humans, yearning for health, education, a place in the sun for | their children, the entrancing gadgets of the modern world, respect, peace, and? “ Free-DOM! “”

Brecher, Edward, 1960. “At the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Cleveland last October we witnessed the first public demonstration of what noise-abatement officers need most – a lightweight portable meter, designed by Floyd C. Anderson of Boeing Airplane Company, which measures noise simply and directly intones. “ With one of those gadgets, “ says Trooper Malesky longingly, “ I could really quiet this pike, “ Despite lack of a meter, the Connecticut truck-stopping program has proved reasonably effective.”

Rossman, Michael, 1961. “Also, who is to judge at the outset whether a gadget invention is not worthy of a patent? The telephone, telegraph, movie, radio and television were regarded as mere ‘gadgets’ in their early stages. In fact, nearly all basic inventions must necessarily go through the ‘gadget’ stage. The Patent Office policy of resolving doubts in favor of the inventor is thus sound. It encourages investment which promotes industrial progress.”

Mazia, Daniel, 1961. “If mitosis is not desperately discouraging as a problem of molecular biology, it is because the complex operations are embodied in a definite structural assembly––the mitotic apparatus––that can be regarded as a gadget for performing the operations. We can approach the physics and chemistry of mitosis through the study of the formation, structure and changes of the mitotic apparatus, without forgetting that mitosis is an operation of the whole cell.”

Streeter, Edward, 1961. “How in the world did one attach a pegboard to a stone wall? How did one attach anything to a stone wall, for that matter? After the pegboard there would be the paneling. He sat down on an old box and focused on the problem. Perhaps one bored holes in the stone with some kind of an electric gadget. But then, when you stuck things into the holes, why didn’t they come right out again? It all seemed rather hopeless.”

Valentine, Helen, 1961. “Make up a package of all the things a new home can’t do without. What? A ball of twine, Scotch tape, a pair of kitchen shears, a box of elastic bands, a package of small pads for marketing lists, a box of sharpened pencils, a tiny tool kit, some pushpins, a new telephone-address book for both husband and wife, a box of kitchen matches, an extension cord, a gadget to unscrew jar lids, and anything else you’ve found you can’t get along without.”

Gallun, Raymond Z., 1961. “” I’ll only draw enough earnings to build me a real, deep-space bubb, nuclear-propelled, and with certain extra gadgets. A few guys have tried to follow the unmanned, instrumented rockets, out to the system of Saturn. Nobody got back, yet. I think I know what they figured wrong. The instruments showed – well, skip it… I’m going into Town to prepare. It’ll take quite a while, so I’ll have some fun, too. “”

, 1961. “A fine designer, he sometimes got carried away by his last-minute ideas. Production men and cost accountants were run ragged by his habit of adding strips of chrome and other gadgets to models ready for production.”

, 1961. “Creators of intelligent artificial brains, said Williams, should strive for machines that are designed and built specially for abstract thinking. The necessary hardware will soon be available: electronic units, analogous to brain cells, that can be produced by the billion, be made too small to see with a microscope, send 100 million signals per second, never make mistakes and last indefinitely. Computers made of these wonderful gadgets and geared for abstract thought should be able to outthink the brightest human brain.”

Villiers, Alan, 1961. “I looked in vain for modern instruments. “ Got none, “ said Campbell. “ Don’t hold with all these gadgets. “ Skipper Smith explained that they went out on bearings. When certain hills and headlands bore in certain directions, and the weather was right and the state of the moon and tide, |p517 and all that sort of natural thing, why they knew they’d as good a chance of getting on fish there as anywhere else, and shot their nets in a businesslike and orderly manner. That was that.”

Wallich, Henry Christopher, 1961. “Public needs are underfinanced while private tastes are overindulged? that is the proposition. The two parts of the proposition seem neatly to complement each other? too much of one, therefore too little of the other. In fact they don’t. It is one thing to be irritated by certain manifestations of our contemporary civilization? the gadgets, the chrome, the tailfins, and the activities that go with them. It is quite another? and something of a non sequitur? to conclude from this that the only alternative to foolish private spending is public spending. Better private spending is just as much of a possibility. My contention here will he that to talk in terms of “ public vs. private “ is to confuse the issue. More than that, it is to confuse means and ends.”

Bird, John, 1961. “” When the exhibits come in, I hope you’ll notice that they aren’t just gadgets or toys, “ he said. “ To qualify they have to demonstrate a scientific principle or development and do it in an original way – not just an imitation. We have teams of top-notch judges for each category – specialists from education and industry. Projects which are rated Superior or Excellent win awards. It wasn’t long before Albert Thiess Jr., the boy with the photoelectric-cell demonstration. Caine in and began setting up his project. tl le later won a Superior award.”

Glenn, John, 1962. “This is Friendship Seven. Turned around, yawed 180 [degrees] to see the sunrise here, and also to see these little, these little gadgets here that I don’t know what they are. … They do not seen, to be coming from the capsule at all. There are too many of them. They’re all spread out all over the place; it looks like they’re some of them might be miles away.”

Cook, Fred J. , 1962. “The holdup killers, shooting up the town and spreading tack’s on the road behind them to hinder pursuit, made, good their escape. As chance would have it, the South Braintree crime occurred at the precise moment when Chief Stewart, Pinkerton? agents and immigration’ inspectors were turning up some curious angles that, Chief Stewart felt, might be related to the Bridgewater holdup - attempt. The Pinkertons had located an improbable witness who claimed to have invented a crime machine. One look into this unlikely gadget, according to, the inventor, would tell you just who committed any given crime. The Pinkertons, skeptical people, weren’t very interested, in the crime machine, but they were decidedly interested in the gossip its’ creator had’ picked Up in the Italian, community. AcCOrding to this, the men involved in the Bridgewater holdup attempt had been Italian anarchists who had been living in a shack near, the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy.)”

Harrison, Harry, 1962. “He opened the hinged top. “ You will see the Space Wave coils at each end of the ship. “ With a pencil he pointed out the odd shaped plastic forms about an inch in diameter that had been wound – apparently at random – with a few turns of copper wire. Except for these coils the interior of the model was empty. The coils were wired together and other wires ran out through the hole in the bottom of the control box. Biff Hawton turned a very quizzical eye on the gadget and upon the demonstrator who completely ignored this sign of disbelief. “ Inside the control box is the battery, “ the young man said, snapping it open and pointing to an ordinary flashlight battery. “ The current goes through the Power Switch and Power Light to the Wave Generator… “ “ What you mean to say, “ Biff broke in, “ is that the juice from this fifteen cent battery goes through this cheap rheostat to those meaningless coils in the model and absolutely nothing happens.”

Garrett, Randall, 1962. “The little gadget that Mike the Angel carried did more than just detect the nearby operation of a vibroblade. It was also a defense. The gadget focused a high-density magnetic field on any vibroblade that came anywhere within six inches of Mike’s body. In that field, the steel blade simply couldn’t move. It was as though it had been caught in a vise. The blade no longer vibrated; it had become nothing more than an overly fancy bread knife.”

Schmitz, James H., 1962. “” You knew he would try to kill you? “ she asked shakily. “ Suspected he had it in mind – he gave in too quick. But I thought I’d have a chance to take any gadget he was hiding away from him first. I was wrong about that. Now we’d better move fast… “”

Schmitz, James H., 1962. “Because that’s the way the thing works. When the Geest gun passed through the model plate, it was analyzed down to its last little molecule. The duplicate is now being built up from that analysis. Every fraction of every element used in the original will show up again exactly. Why do you think the stuff’s so expensive? “ Phil grinned. “ All right, I’m convinced. How do we get rid of the inscription? “ “ The gadget will handle that, “ Jackson said. “ Crack that edge off, treat the cracked surface to match the wear of the rest. “ He smiled. “ Makes an Earth forger’s life look easy, doesn’t it? “”

O’Hara, John Henry, 1962. “Opening night seats for all the plays I work on. The press agent offers them to his boss, the boss offers them to the president of the American Gadget Corporation, and the president of the American Gadget Corporation gives them to somebody else. Very seldom you can parlay a favour as much as that. Everybody’s happy, and I get box seats for the ball games. Wuddia say, Frank?”

, 1962. “Up-to-date archaeologists interested in esoteric problems heard last week about a handy way of finding answers to such questions-for a latrine’s humus-rich contents have magnetic properties that vary from the earth around them. The clever instrument that can tell the difference was the hit of an erudite conference that met at Venice to discuss new methods of archaeology. Called a proton magnetometer, the gadget is based on a principle of nuclear physics discovered only a few years ago. The nuclei of hydrogen atoms (protons) are, in effect, tiny magnets, and they line up like compass needles parallel to the earth’s magnetic field. When nudged out of alignment, they oscillate for a few seconds, the speed of their oscillation changing with the local strength of the earth’s magnetism. Buried objects that affect the field show up plainly.”

Brodeur, Paul, 1962. “Sterling will furnish its Teleguide service free of charge, and will support the venture by selling one-minute advertising spots, live nr on film, which will he limited to two and a half minutes out of every fifteen minutes of programming. Unlike the tourists who will absorb enlightenment from Teleguide, brokers hoping to benefit from the services rendered by Telequote II, a prodigious gadget, already in operation, that compresses all market information into a single system and flashes stock quotations in Kelly green, have to pay a rental fee of seven hundred and fifty dollars … Four of Telequotes eight channels feature current last-sales prices of issues traded on the N. Y. and the American Stock Exchanges. Telequote II was developed by the Teleregister Corporation, of Stamford. (Telequote I performed the same function, in a less elaborate way outside of N.Y.), it was also developed by the Teleregister Corporation.”

Bone, Jesse F., 1962. “” We work by remote control, just like they do at the AEC. See those handlers? “ He pointed to the control console set into a small stainless steel table standing beside the sheet of glass at the far end of the cubicle. “ They’re connected to those gadgets up there. “ He indicated the jointed arms hanging over the autopsy table in the room beyond. “ I could perform a major operation from here and never touch the patient. Using these I can do anything I could in person with the difference that there’s a quarter inch of glass between me and my work. I have controls that let me use magnifiers, and even do microdissection, if necessary. “”

Calisher, Hortense, 1962. “thinking he would break her frail body, but when he had finished she would come to him with great eyes wide, scrape his neck with her nails, and ask him to “ be a man again. “ One night, after finding the very middle of her in a new way, he called her later, trembling, and said, “ I shouldn’t have done that to you. Let’s not do it again. “ But they did it again the next night in his room and the fiddler opened the door, his elasticized old-man gadgets dangling, and caught them at it. Stern, in an action he could not explain, carried her, without a word to the old man, out the window and to the garden below, and they never did that thing again. They parted for a year. She stayed in Oregon, and Stern, heavy with guilt as he stole a final bite, flew to New York in search of girls who knew Turgenev. A great singingfreedom came over him, but the closest he came to”

, 1962. “Titan II is considerably bigger (102 ft. high) than Titan I or Atlas, has greater thrust (430,000 Ibs. v. the Atlas’ 360,000 Ibs.) and has far fewer gadgets that can go wrong. Says Aerojet-General’s A. L. Feldman, technical program manager: “ We got rid of all the garbage. Titan II is the simplest, most elegant and most advanced missile we’ve got today. “”

Ann E. Jewett, Clyde Knapp, 1962. “The average modern man uses his muscles as little as possible, and today’s labor-saving gadgets really pamper him. The resulting muscle weakness shows in three places. First, many men and most women are weak in hands, arms, shoulders, and upper trunk muscles. Consequently, their chins protrude and their shoulders sag.”

Scheerer, Martin, 1963. “Each subject was told that his task was to transport all the weights in the wagon from one side of a table (‘Lawrence’) to the other side (‘Topeka’), that the wheels must roll freely, that he could make as many trips as he wished and that there were no hidden tricks or gadgets on the wagon––that its rolling was a function of the among of weight in it.”

Boutwell, Jane, 1963. “For years, our friend had subscribed to a telephone-answering service, but recently, in an access of modernity, he decided to employ a recording gadget instead, and so informed the answering service. By return mail, he received a letter of dissuasion and supplication from the company. Many people (the letter reasonably pointed out I will be confused and annoyed by having a machine answer their call, and still hang up without leaving any message at all. Patients look for personal interest in their calls, and the cold and mechanical approach of a machine destroys personal confidence.”

Maurois, Andre, 1963. “THE THIRD major criticism is that Americans are materialists. “ The only things that interest them are their gadgets. They have no spiritual life, no culture, no traditions. Their God is the almighty dollar. When you visit their country, the guides always tell you how big a thing is, how much it cost. And when Americans visit a country like Greece, they stop in front of the Acropolis and ask, How much did this cost to build?’ They adore statistics, and put blind faith in them. Their over-accelerated pace of life leaves no time for beauty or sentiment”

Markfield, Wallace, 1964. “I built my shiny new house, and my children slept in shiny ruffled bedrooms. The whole town buzzed when I had a contractor from Mobile do the kitchen and the bathrooms. The master bath had a sunken tub and a tiny sun-bathing patio. The kitchen was right out of House and Garden: it had everything, every gadget that could be installed.”

Maibaum, Richard, 1964. “TWO-SHOT BOND Allow a man to stop off for a quick one on route. “ Q “ (exasperated) It has not been perfected after years of patient research and time for that purpose, double-o-seven. “ Q “ gets out of the car and shuts the door. Bond glances at the gadgets in his hand then leans an arm on the roof of the car. “ Q “ And incidentally, we’d appreciate its return, along with all your other equipment – intact, for once, when you return from the field. BOND Well, you’d be surprised the amount of wear-and-tear that goes on out there in the field. Anything else? “ Q “ walks forward. DOLLY IN on Bond, looking bored. “”

, 1964. “The electronic gadgets so vital to vehicles in far-out space suffer from some far-out troubles. Cosmic radiation sickens their semiconductors. Vibrations and swift temperature changes cause fractures in all-important wires. Lubricants evaporate into the vacuum of space. But scientists are already working on some far-out cures. The latest: a tin-magnesium-aluminum alloy that can be made into wires that grow gap-bridging “ whiskers “ when broken and soon heal their own wounds.”

, 1965. “KENNETH D. ROEDER (“Moths and Ultrasound”) is professor of physi­ology at Tufts University, where he has served since 1931. He was born in England, was graduated from the University of Cambridge and did gradu­ate work there and at the University of Toronto. “My lifelong interest in in­sects,” he writes, “probably stems from a childhood enthusiasm for butterfly collecting.” Roeder’s research deals mainly with the biological aspects of insect behavior. In addition he is “an incurable tinkerer with mechanical and electronic gadgets,” an activity that “led at one time to the construction of an electromechanical analogue of certain phases of cockroach behavior and has played a part in the work on moth hear­ing.” He says he has “always felt that if one can make a subject clear and inter­esting to a nonspecialist, it becomes clearer and more interesting to oneself.”

Stern, Richard G., 1965. “The Khazars bust out in the east and knockthe Lombards into Italy. The Franks move into Frankland. f Martel needs money, confiscates church lands to maintain a cavalry, and so his grandson drives in and knocks the Lombards for a loop in Italy and gets crowned by the Pope right over there, “ thumb back at St. Peter’s. “ The big sweep. Hundreds of years. Where does that leave one man or ten? And it’s only a paragraph. A tribe agitated by bad crops here, a gadget there. Who can tell what’ll count? Louis the Fourteenth wins an argument about the windows at Versailles, so the builder loses his general’s job, and the French lose in Holland so you get a Dutch king of England.”

Lemon, Richard, 1965. “The large mobiles and stabiles are built in foundries, from models, with Calder supervising, He uses no power tools, and has invented many of his hand tools, including a gadget for locating the center of gravity of a piece of material, He balances the piece on a metal tip which stands below a metal arm holding a poised nail. He then raps the nail down to mark the central spot. His studio is a magician’s junkyard. overflowing with old models and mobiles, and hits and snips of metal.”

von Eckardt, Wolf, 1965. “Prosperity came late to Finland, “ he said, “ because until recently the Soviets got every penny we earned as war reparations. Perhaps that was an advantage. We could learn from your mistakes. When we finally caught up. we asked ourselves: What are we to do with our new affluence? We can’t eat more. There is a Iimit to the automobiles and gadgets we really need. So I started to persuade my countrymen that we should build a beautiful and suitable environment for everyone. Good housing is not enough. We have to counteract the strains and tensions of modern urban life.”

Greenberg, Selig, 1965. “Since there are degrees of illness and of skill needed in handling them, he will resume his rightful role in the medical constellation and will guide his patients through the growing complexities of health care. By being freed of the burden of an overcrowded schedule, he will have time for thorough examination and history taking. He will depend on the acuity of his educated powers of observation even more than on gadgets to detect the danger signals of any possible deviation from the normal. A grounding in clinical psychiatry will enable him to evaluate and treat common emotional stresses that are often at the root of organic disease.”

Beranek, Leo L., 1966. “Apartment hunters have been known to carry portable radios with them so that they can test the noise transfer from one apartment to the next. Some owners of cooperative apartments are compelled to spend large sums to insulate their dwellings more satisfactorily against the noise of their neighbors. […] In Europe long experience in apartment living and a popular taste for gracious living (in preference to gadgets) have led to careful attention to noise control in the construction of multiple-family dwellings. Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and the U.S.S.R. have well-developed acoustical building codes that have been applied to the large-scale program of rebuilding of housing since World War II.”

Updike, John, 1966. “When they try to fill the swimming pool, the water thrashes and pitches so hysterically that I peek over the edge expecting to see a captured mermaid. In the bar, the bottles tinkle like some immensely dainty Swiss gadget, and the Daiquiris come to you aquiver, little circlets of agitation spinning back and forth between the center and the rim.”

Eastlake, William, 1966. “” Stop saying that, “ I said, “ and tell me, you’ve been here a long time, tell me if you have a friend with a camel, know anyone who would rent one. “ “ Oh, I dare say, “ the boy from Antioch said. And then I realized he must be some kind of mechanical gadget who could say this and nothing more, something a magi had produced and was still surrounded in smoke, something that would disappear when the smoke left. Now the other two beards crept in. You want some pot? “ they said. “ No, “ I said. “ T don’t smoke it. It doesn’t bother any of us that we don’t smoke it except Mike. That’s why he’s looking for a camel. “ “ That makes sense, “”

, 1966. “The President has tried everything short of plastic surgery to remodel his image. To polish his TV personality, Johnson has tried contact lenses, light face makeup, and a variety of electronic prompting gadgets, only belatedly realizing that he winds up looking shifty-eyed and irritable. In desperation, L.BJ. of late has banned all TV cameras from his press conferences.”

Forte, Francesco, 1966. “But if in the end this is the only benefit to be expected from the value added tax, it should be pointed out that electronic analysis of income tax data may provide the same information without a new tax gadget”

Smith, Cyril Stanley, 1967. “Presenting an issue on materials in two aspects: (1) the fundamental nature of metals, ceramics, glasses, polymers and composite materials and (2) the properties that all materials possess in varying degrees. […] The tools, guns, gadgets and cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the instruments for the rise of modern science, the machines and structures of the 19th-century engineers––all were made of materials that had been known centuries before the rise of Greece.”

Ehrenberg, W., 1967. “Smoluchowski’s point can be better appreciated by translating it into modern terms. Although he refers to recent progress in electronics, ideas such as the rectification of an alternating voltage had barely arisen in his time. Today the principle of rectification plays a major role in such solid-state electronic devices as diodes and transistors. These devices are analogous to the hypothetical gadgets that translate the up-and-down movement of a Brownian particle into a purely upward motion, or that perform the old demon’s trick of permitting only fast molecules to go from left to right.”

Kazan, Elia, 1967. “We used to just run to get into bed and read their reviews out loud to each other. We sent for various catalogues. We ordered LP’s together, and books, and we ordered all kinds of fascinating gadgets from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue, and outdoor clothes and fishing equipment from Abercrombie &; Fitch. What sport it was when the102stuff arrived!”

Benrey, Ronald M., 1967. “If you’ve ever doubted that listening to good music at home is as much of a hobby as it is a pleasure, just cast an eve at the assortment of hi-fi accessories that POPULAR SCIENCE has assembled on these pages. We bought them to find out if these gadgets really can improve the sound you hear. Here’s what we learned: Record cleaners. A minute speck of dust looks like a huge boulder to the tiny stylus in your stereo cartridge. Every time the stylus hits a dust speck as it races through a dirty record’s groove, the cartridge generates an output voltage spike that produces crackle and pop.”

Kobler, John, 1967. “Sometimes. however, he is under the influence of alcohol when he commits his offenses. He is exaggeratedly preoccupied with cleanliness and order. He belongs to no organized social groups and has no intimate friends. Competitive sports and games don’t apical to him. He likes mechanical gadgets. movies and art, though he is not artistically gifted. His emotional impairments differ in degree rather than kind from those of law-abiding neurotics and even many “ normal “ people.”

Benedict, James, 1968. “French, in borrowing the English word ‘gadget’, lays far more stress than English-speakers generally do on the connotation for which a gadget is an object, such as a novelty item, with no function or use value. It is with this emphasis that the author uses the term here and throughout the present work.” (7) And as for using the word “gizmo”: “I have used ‘gizmo’ for the French catch-all term ‘machin,’ whose close kinship to the French ‘machine’ is thus not apparent in the English (123)”

Fano, R. M., 1968. “The situation is particularly alarming in view of the vested interests that already exist with respect to the development and sale of privacy-invading devices and procedures. Perhaps even more alarm­ing are two attitudes that, it seems to me, underlie the speed with which some of the privacy-invading practices have taken root, and that are likely to be the basis for a continuing demand for them. The first attitude can be characterized as an infatuation with gadgets and procedures that appear, at least to the layman, to be scientific. This attitude seems to lead people to fit problems and objectives to the tools that happen to be available. The second attitude, encouraged by an all too human desire to avoid personal responsibility for decisions is a preference for data and procedures that lend themselves to mechanization, in the belief that the elimination of human judgment is in itself desirable. I am reminded here of what the late Norbert Wiener used to say (as far back as 1950) with regard to the use of computers. He stressed that the greatest danger lies in our delegating to computers, out of ignorance or mental laziness, decisions that should remain ours.”

Kreiling, Frederick C., 1968. “He functioned at one time or another, and often simultaneously, as political theorist, diplomat, engineer, inventor of gadgets and house historian for German princely families”

Philip, Phylis Morrison, 1968. “The pages present succinct descriptions, drawings and photographs of about three dozen marvelous gadgets from the heroic history of technology, all realized as working models. There is no attempt to follow scale, materials or finish in authentic detail; the aim is to abstract and exhibit the ‘particular go’ of each machine. Most of the devices are to be made at the woodworker’s bench, with some sheet-metal, plastic, rope or hardboard parts. A number call for machined metal gearing that is beyond amateur skills; one can criticize the absence of much effort here to help young people take advantage of the rich marketplace of manufactured parts in our technological era. The book is nonetheless a pleasure and a challenge. Who would not like to see working models of the device used to generate screw threads without copying any existing thread; of the chinese spoon-tilt hammer, an automatic water-power scheme still familiar in Japanese gardens, or of the cornish man-engine, a vertical moving belt of miners, forerunner of the mine hoist?”

, 1968. “Auto manufacturers are adding more safety gadgets to cars every year. Highway engineers spend billions of dollars, planning and constructing super-safe roads and highways, all geared for today’s high-powered cars. Yes, many things are being done for your safety and mine.”

Nwuneli, Emmanuel, 1968. “The whites are still proud of Europe, their point of take-off on their way enroute to America. But what of the Black man? — Save his pour soul == The American TV, the piped-in brainwashing home equipment ever designed by man, has reorientated the Black man into constant ferocious denounciation of Africa. But the Black man owes no apologies, for he was confronted with a powerful gadget and situation over which he has no strong control.”

, 1968. “Each brand has a number of models and sizes with every kind of gadget imaginable, and there is a good deal of variation from brand to brand. “

Moore, Martha, 1968. “Small tools, gadgets, and appliances may be protected from rust and mildew by first wiping with oiled cloth and then storing in air-tight plastic bags.”

, 1968. “A factor forcing this gamble is what may be called the “space-industrial complex.” / Lapp states: / “The aerospace industries grab half of prime military contract awards. And they are concentrated in sensitive areas like California and Texas. … It had a peak force of 11,000 workers — many from New Orleans.” / In other words, the more gadgets we send up and the more the space program expands, the richer will the aerospace industries be. / … Nossiter quotes Samuel F. Downer, the financial vice-president for LTV Aerospace, which produces space and military equipment. / Downer states: “If you’re president and you need a control factor in the economy and you sell this factor, you can’t sell Harlem and Watts but you can sell self-preservation, a new environment. We’re going to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia are ahead of us. The American people understand this.” / The producers of arms and space paraphernalia are naturally for the arms races. And as long as the American people uncritically support these ventures, we will continue to recklessly risk the lives of spacemen and combatants, and we will never get around to the much more urgent tasks of solving Watts and Harlem.”

Melendez, Gwen, 1968. “1. Christmas is when you have an allergy for fur and you receive a gift of a squirrel monkey from your favorite aunt on your father’s side of the family. 2. Christmas is when you receive a sled with all of the modern accompanying gadgets and it rains during the holidays. 3. Christmas is when you have $5.07 left for gifts and your two cousins, a grandparent, and a favorite uncle are still outstanding on your shopping list. 4. Christmas is when you run out of hot dogs, potato chips, pop corn, and “cokes” before one-third of your records have been played and one half of your guests have arrived.”

, 1968. “Programmed with the salaries of the participants, the device starts with the push of a button and, on a wall-mounted Scoreboard, flashes a minute-by-minute reckoning of the conference cost. The more and the mightier the brass, Lyngso explains, “ the more power is used, the faster the wheels run and the larger the bill becomes. “ # A tinkerer who started out in a small basement shop 16 years ago, Lyngso credits the gadget with cutting down the proliferation of meetings that have come with the growth of his own firm, Soren T. Lyngso, Dansk Servo Teknik, to two plants and 160 employees. He finds that the machine starts saving money even before conferences start: nowadays his managers whenever possible skip calling meetings rather than watch the machine add up the cost.”

, 1968. “other teaching aids, a camera-equipped mechanical phallus. Experiment places its research project, supplied with similar equipment, in a crummy Ohio college. Faculty wives are among the volunteers. Neither Robert Kyle nor Patrick Catling is a hopelessly bad writer, sentence by sentence, although Catling wins the nomination for the silliest line of the year (so far): “ Camilla’s cheeks prettily pinkened. “ # The Deal, by G. William Marshall (511 pages; Bartholomew House; $6.95) is notable, by contrast, for its more traditional approach. No new-fangled gadgets here; just the plain, old-fashioned dildo. That is understandable, since the plot is a plain, old-fashioned story about the raunchy movie world. The hero is “ the Baron, “ Hollywood’s No. 1 superstar. He has a “ tremendous problem. “ He is forever being “ laughed out of bedrooms, “ so he asks the boys over an makeup to fashion a substitute artifact for him. He kills a girl with it. # Perhaps the most interesting fact about this limpid novel is”

, 1968. “Men may think they have more freedom and more choices, he says, but the options open to them are not meaningfully different. In this state, man rejects all thoughts that challenge society’s rationale-hence Marcuse’s definition of man as “ one-dimensional. “ # “ The goods and services that the individuals buy, “ he writes, “ control their needs and petrify their faculties. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable gadgetsthat keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue-which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions. “”

, 1969. “Nance was gradu­ated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in English. He writes: “After an exposure to the fascination of electronic gadgetry during service in the Air Force I changed fields and studied physics and mathematics at Purdue University. For seven years I was a research engineer with General Motors, finally combining my two loves–words and gadgets–as a technical editor.”

, 1969. “Includes camera, 1 roll color print film, 2 batteries, 3 flashcubes, snapshot folder, gadget bag, film developing coupon worth $1”

, 1969. “Bacon decurler, handy gadget, 88c”

Matthews, Sondra, 1969. “During this time of patriotic feelings, the liberals insure the promise of pay-off from the chosen side, and they begin to send our sons, husbands, and other love ones to assist as a return on that job opportunity. / We look around at the gadgets we own for the first time, even if they’re not paid for, with a ‘they’re mine’ attitude, and we decide that there is no better place than America, and kiss the men good-by for God and HIS Country. / Six months later, our neighbor, our kin folk, and soon we find that our men will not return, a telegram comes telling they’re dead.”

, 1969. “In addition, Consumer Reports brings you a wide range of authoritative—sometimes startling—articles. You regularly receive candid, down-to-earth discussions of deceptive packaging practices (with examples cited by name), advertising claims, credit buying and the actual cost of credit . . . honest reports on vitamins and other drugs . . . revealing facts about new, highly promoted gadgets that are often a waste of money.”

Prestbo, John A., 1969. “The latest executive nightmare, already spread to epidemic proportions, goes something like this: Widget &; Gadget Corp., dutifully complying with new Securities and Exchange Commission rules, breaks down its consolidated profit and reveals for the first time how much came from widgets and how much from gadgets, its two lines of business. It turns out that widgets are piling up profits like crazy, but gadgets are pretty sick.”

Michaels, Barbara, 1969. “Good God, of course! The Lancashire Witches. Sixteen… thirty-something? Old Demdike, the head witch of the coven, her real name was Device. The whole damned family were witches. Oh, no. Don’t tell me – “ “ Oh, yes. “ Volz gave a hoarse shout of laughter, and one of the vile gadgets caught the vibration and whispered rustily. | “ Our little lady is the last descendant of one of the most notorious families in the history of witchcraft. Funniest thing I ever heard of.”

Mathews, Linda McVeight, 1969. “Within a couple of years. computers will not only pinpoint crime target areas but also automatically assign patrols when and where they are needed, making possible what Reddin. calls “ instant cop? an officer at the scene of a call minutes after it’s made. Hipped on technology, Reddin wants gadgets that will permit officers to see in the dark, frisk suspects without touching them, # | and halt speeding automobiles without firing a shot. In his conception of law enforcement, computerization and gadgetry are not ends in themselves but will free officers to get at the real task of policing: knowing the people.”