New Products

THE MARKET PLACE

So much that was once so simple has grown so complicated in the electro-technological age that new triumphs of human ingenuity are now required to make things manageable again. Items:

P:TELEPHONES could once be activated by merely speaking the number with eyes closed, then had to be worked by coordinating eye and forefinger, and now, with the advent of all-digit dialing, demand intellectual concentration as well. But wait. A device called Dial-A-Word has come to the rescue. A plastic disk that slips over a dial gives a choice of two consonants for every number, which can then be combined with vowels (which are placed so that they don't register) to translate any combination of digits into an easily remembered phrase. Thus the number of the CIA--351-1100--becomes AH ME, CUBA BAY, OY. The New Yorker who wants to call A.T. & T. to complain about all-digit dialing dials GO WAG A WET YOYO.

P:MILK, which once arrived from the dairy in a pail, then in bottles, then mostly in leak-prone cartons, is now flowing back by the pailful. Several hundred dairies are now delivering milk in five, six-or ten-quart containers, consisting of a cardboard box shaped to fit easily into the refrigerator; inside is a plastic bag with a dispensing nozzle. Advantages: the milk, protected from exposure to air and from the "heat shock" caused by removal from the refrigerator, lasts much longer, takes up less room--and is delivered.

P:FISH, which are increasingly difficult to find among the wakes of powerboats, are now indicated by Aqua-Ear, an underwater sonic system that tells the fisherman where to cut off the engine. And the underwater swimmer, after years of face masks that cut vision from 180DEG to 75DEG and made the prettiest girl look like a sea monster, can now buy a new kind of contact lens: a tiny mask made of shatterproof plastic that covers the entire eyeball. Invented by Washington, D.C., Optometrist Alan Grant and Navy Captain Edward Beckman, the new lenses cost $175 a pair, or roughly the same as regular contacts.

P:NATURE, once free for the staring, now crowded by the split-levels, becomes intimate in an outside-the-window plastic bird house called Vue-A-Nest, equipped with a one-way mirror so that ornithological voyeurs do not have to venture outside to see what really goes on among their feathered friends.

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