The Norge gas dryers were not all that fast. The 37K BTU burner in some Kenmore dryers made them very fast because the dryer could run at a higher temperature. As Norge dryers aged, the seals allowed air to be blown out because instead of air being pulled through the dryer it was blown through so they became lint flockers. They were ruggedly built with the drive wheel under the drum like early WH dryers, but in a much more substantial way. Because Norge dryers blew the tumbling fabrics against the front of the drum and the door seal, they were hard on them. The door seals were often the part of the dryer that showed the most wear.

Their old design gas dryers first used a drilled port cast iron burner that stretched the width of the drum across the back of the dryer. At first it faced up and the little flames were pulled forward toward the fan, but then the ports clogged with lint so they turned it over so the ports and the little flames faced down. Then, I guess that got too expensive so they put in a gun-type burner that was more like the WP-design in that just shot fire like a flame thrower into a combustion chamber behind the drum and below the opening where the heat was sucked off the fire and blown into the drum. There was a warning label on the back panel to never operate the dryer without the panel in place. It would probably set fire to anything in the area.

The early electric dryers had the open coil heating elements strung across the width of the area where the burner was in the gas dryers.

I like the sentence about the water heater coming on as soon as a tap was opened. This was a dig at electric water heaters that operated on off-peak meters so once the current was turned off, you only had a fixed amount of hot water until the next evening. The clock on the control panel was to help with that by letting the washer start once the water was hot after you were asleep like "time bake" on an oven. I guess if you could stay awake and had a suds saver model, you could do a lot of wash with minimal hot water while the rest of the world slept, especially if you did not wait for the washer to go through the rinse cycle with each load but just washed each load and stopped the machine after the first spin and put in another load.  If you rinsed each load consecutively in cold water it would not matter about the hot water supply, but that could make using an automatic washer almost as labor-intensive as using a wringer washer.

I don't believe I ever read that Consumer Reports rated Norge dryers as "very fast." They would have been faster if they had operated at a higher temperature, but they didn't.

As to the no tumbling, there were two devices, a lever at the top of the drum opening on the earlier and more expensive models and a knob that you turned behind the lint trap access panel on cheaper models, both of which lifted the drum off the drive roller. Because the 21 inch fan was powered separately from the drum, the fan could continue to turn while the drum remained stationary.

Norge gas dryers had variable input settings like our first one had low and Super Fast, but it was just high and low input and flame size. The operating temp was low and not adjustable, I believe. We saw one of the early ones with the big red handle to adjust the gas valve under the rectangular door on top. With Norge's high air flow, a lower flame kept the temperature down for delicates.