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To speed conventional construction projects, there are new guns galore: Flint-kote's "Sealzit" spray guns spray roofing on flat or free-form surfaces, may well make the shingle obsolete. Atlanta's Lenox Square shopping center was constructed with the True Gun. developed by Tulsa's Max True, which sprays concrete. A wire-tying gun enables workmen simply to aim at the joint where steel reinforcing rods need to be lashed, pull the trigger, and the job is done. For do-it-yourself fans, Chicago's Wonder Building Corp. has brought out fallout-bomb-shelter kits: backyard model for $1,200, smaller basement shelter for $295.
Pet's Milk. The new products of 1960 have something for every member of the family. Westinghouse has a new thermoelectric baby-bottle minder that keeps the milk cold until feeding time, then automatically warms it. When it is ready, it sounds an alarm to wake up mother. To make sure baby goes back to sleep, the Evenflo-Lullaby bottle plays Brahms's Lullaby. For the household pets, the new est drinks are Dog Nog and Cat Lap—canned milk for animals, develooed by onetime New York Advertising Man Arthur D. Talbott. While conducting market research on milk use, Talbott discovered that 25% of evaporated milk was bought to feed animals, realized that there was a rich market for a special pet milk. It is cheaper than regular canned milk and better for an animal's nutrient needs.
Last week the U.S. Agriculture Department announced a way to end the bane of a dog's life—fleas. By adding certain chemicals to dog food, it found that fleas that bit the dogs died.
So marvelous is U.S. technology today that practically any good idea can be turned into a product. The Army needed a giant ditchdigger. Barber-Greene Co. built one: a voracious behemoth that can dig a continuous trench 2-ft. wide and 6-ft. deep through any surface, including rock and coral, is now available to commercial purchasers. Le Tourneau Inc. of Texas built a mobile island crane that can be towed out to an offshore construction site, its legs sunk and anchored while it does its job. The job finished, the legs can be retracted, and the island crane towed to another site. Not all products are so complex—or necessary: a harassed doctor invented a candy-coated tongue depressor for examining children.
Second Martini Ideas. The number of new products, or what often turn out to be merely new trimmings on an old product, has become so great that many a businessman has begun to wonder whether gadgets may get the upper hand. Said one Westinghouse vice president: "Frivolous features on appliances that were nothing more than second-martini ideas have claimed unnecessarily hundreds of thou sands of dollars in research money." If the money wasted by industry on meaningless model changes were plowed into basic research, the genuinely new products would blossom that much faster.