by A. J. Jacobs
Eric emits a sound somewhere between a hmmmm and a groan. Whatever it is, it is not a good sound. It is a bad sound—and a shocking one. This is crazy. Eric doesn’t know? That just doesn’t compute. That’s like the pope not being a Catholic. That’s like the kami not being Shinto. I lost a couple of seconds trying to reorient myself.
“Erythrocyte?” he says.
“Type it in!” I say. “E-r-y-t-h-r-o-c-y-t-e.”
I am telling him to Google it—it’s a dirty little secret of Millionaire that the lifelines often use a computer. The crowd titters at my boldness.
“Tell me the choices again?” he says.
And then, before I can list A or B or C or D, time runs out.
Meredith gives me a sympathetic smile.
“I thought he knew everything!” I say.
The crowd laughs, but I wasn’t kidding. I really did.
Now I panic. Now I feel alone out there. I swivel a bit in my chair, swivel back. I still have something called a fifty-fifty, where two of the answers are randomly taken away. I use it. I am left with serum and red blood cells. Serum, red blood cells. Red blood cells, serum.
“Well, you’d think I’d have heard the scientific name for red blood cells,” I said. “I can’t believe I wouldn’t have. I’m going to say serum.” I pause. “Serum. Final answer.”
Meredith looks genuinely pained.
“Another word for ‘erythrocyte’ is ‘red blood cell’.”
I sink my head into my hands. That’s it. My little moment in the melodramatic lighting is done. Meredith cuts to commercial. I dismount the Hot Seat and am brought backstage, where I’m greeted by Julie, my mom and dad, who all say they’re proud of me—at least I think that’s what they’re saying. But mostly, I’m hearing “You did a great erythrocyte! The crowd really erythrocyted you.” That’s all I can think of. Erythrocyte. I will never forget that word. They hand me my check—my winnings have plunged all the way down to $1,000.
When I get back to the office, I call Eric.
“You owe me thirty-one thousand dollars!” I say, sort of jokingly.
“You’re the writer,” he responds. “You should have known it!”
Eric tells me he did Google it, but ran out of time before he could comb through the results. He didn’t mention whether or not, after he was cut off, he shouted, “Eric!” I hang up. For the next twenty-four hours of my life, I spend all of my mental energy coming up with the ways I should have known “erythrocyte.” First, of course, I should have remembered it from the Britannica. I looked it up, and it’s right there in the E’s: “Erythrocyte: also called red blood cell or red corpuscle.” The cells are biconcave and appear dumbbell-shaped in profile. They are flexible and assume a bell shape as they pass through tiny blood vessels. They contain hemoglobin. Why didn’t I remember that? I should have paid more attention to the biology sections. I should have put vital fluids on my list of things to study.
Not only that, but I knew that “cyte” means “cell.” I should have figured it was either red or white blood cells. I should have told Eric to use Britannica, not Google. I should have had a psychic blood expert in the audience beaming me information telepathically.
So that’s it. My dreams are trampled—I won’t be lighting my Macanudo cigar with hundred-dollar bills. I won’t be popping open a magnum of champagne—or a jeroboam (equal to four bottles), a methuselah (eight bottles), a salmanazar (twelve bottles), a balthazar (sixteen bottles), or a nebuchadnezzar (twenty bottles). But as the hours wear on, I become more and more at peace with my $1,000. First, it’ll pay for two-thirds of my Britannica—about letters A through P—which is something. And I didn’t look like a total jackass out there—that erythrocyte was an obscure question. So obscure, Eric Schoenberg—the Trivial Pursuit champ, the Harvard biochem major, one of the most well informed men in America—didn’t know it either. Eric knows a lot—he knows more than me, I can admit that. But he doesn’t know everything. No one does. And now there’s proof on nationally syndicated television.
W
war, technology of
A soul-crushing ninety-eight pages. It’s a crescendo of ever-more-sophisticated ways that humans have figured out to kill one another. Spears, ramparts, catapults, crossbows, guns, machine guns, missiles.
One passage struck me in particular. It was about the dropping of the second atomic bomb—with the weirdly endearing nickname of Fat Man—on Nagasaki, on August 9 in 1945:
“The B-29 spent 10 minutes over Kokura without sighting its aim point; it then proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, where at 11:02 AM local time, the weapon was air-burst at 1650 feet with a force of 21 kilotons.”
I had no idea that the Japanense city of Kokura was the primary target. I’d never even heard of Kokura. But what a strange fact. Imagine how many lives were affected because of this. Seventy thousand dead in Nagasaki and thousands of people spared in Kokura because of cloudy conditions.
I think about those ten minutes when the plane was buzzing over Kokura. All those people going about their day—making phone calls at the office, playing with their kids, eating their meals—totally unaware that a bomb of unimaginable destructive power was hovering overhead, ready to vaporize their bodies. But they survived because the bomber couldn’t spot its X.
It’s something that I’ve learned over and over again: luck plays a huge part in history. We like to think that it’s the product of our will and rational decisions and planning. But I’ve noticed it’s just as often—more often—about seemingly tiny whims of fate.
To take another example from World War II there’s the July Plot to assassinate Hitler. This took place in 1944, and was orchestrated by a group of German conspirators led by an officer named Ernst Stauffenberg. As the Britannica says:
“Stauffenberg slipped from the room, witnessed the explosion at 12:42 pm, and, convinced Hitler was killed, flew to Berlin…[but] an attending officer had nudged the briefcase with a bomb to the far side of a massive oak support of the conference table, which thus shielded Hitler from the full force of the explosion.”
Hitler survived because an attending officer was tidy and wanted the briefcase out of the way. History was changed by the size of an oak table.
Wells, H. G.
Here’s another one who married his cousin. Along with contracting gout, marrying your cousin seems to be a favorite pastime of historical figures. Over the last few months, I’ve been keeping a list of cousin lovers, and here’s just a sampling: Charles Darwin, Henry VIII, Edgar Allan Poe (with his thirteen-year-old cousin, if you recall), Sergey Rachmaninoff, and now, the newest member of the club, H. G. Wells.
I went back to check on Rachmaninoff because I wasn’t positive about him. I was happy to see that, yes, the composer did indeed marry his cousin. But strangely, I noticed something else about him: Rachmaninoff wrote a symphony based on a poem by fellow club member Edgar Allan Poe. Weird.
Back when I was smart the first time—back in high school—I read a short story by Italo Calvino. It was a fable about a city where people’s apartments were connected by threads. The threads were strung from one apartment and across the street or down the block to another apartment. Each thread represented a different kind of relationship. If the people in the two apartments were blood relatives, the threads would be black. If they were in business together, the threads would be white. If one was the boss of the other, the threads would be gray. Eventually, the threads grew so numerous and thick and multishaded that you couldn’t walk through the city.
That’s what history seems like to me now. There are hundreds of threads connecting everybody in all sorts of ways, both expected and unexpected. It’s like a spiderweb (which, by the way, spiders sometimes eat when they’re done with them).
wergild
In ancient Germanic law, this was the payment that someone made to an injured party. Most cultures had a similar concept—in the Middle East, it was called diyah. A life was worth one hundred female camels.
Loss of one eye or foot was fifty she-camels. A blow to the head or abdomen was thirty-three, and loss of a tooth was five.
Still no sign of my $31,000 wergild from Eric for the Millionaire fiasco. But that’s okay. He has given me something else. Julie talked to Alexandra, Eric’s wife, who told her that Eric felt bad about the Millionaire debacle. And not just bad about looking ignorant on national TV. He actually felt guilty about blowing my chances at thirty-two grand. I knew Eric had feelings—he’s a loving father and a good son—but I never imagined those feelings would be directed toward me. This was almost more surprising than when he didn’t know an abstruse biological term. It made me feel all warm and forgiving. I sent him an e-mail.
Thanks for being my lifeline. We didn’t win, but we went down fighting.
Your brother (by marriage, not by erythrocyte),
AJ
I thought that struck the proper note—familial, sympathetic, but still with a gentle dig at the end.
He wrote back:
Glad to be of help. Or rather, no help. At least you don’t have to pay a lot of taxes on your winnings.
Eric
I almost wanted to write back and tell him that if my kid turns out to be as sweet and smart and fun as his kids are, I’ll be a happy man. But there’s a limit, you know?
White House
The White House was originally called the President’s Palace, but the name was changed to Executive Mansion because “palace” was considered too royal. The building didn’t officially become known as the White House until 1902, under Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt, by the way, renovated the second floor to make room for his “children’s exotic pets, which included raccoons, snakes, a badger, and a bear.”
All pretty good facts. But here’s the peculiar part. I was at the office, and I was telling my coworker about the Roosevelt menagerie, and he asked if the bear in question was the Teddy bear. I went on Britannica.com to check, and reread the White House entry. It didn’t say. But I noticed the online version had a whole other anecdote that was cut from the print version for space. The anecdote was this:
Apparently, security at the White House used to be shockingly lax. In 1842, Charles Dickens was invited to the White House by John Tyler. Dickens arrived at the mansion, knocked on the door. No one answered. So—and this is what it says—he let himself in. Just walked right through the front door and started poking around the rooms unchaperoned. The esteemed British author finally stumbled onto a couple of dozen presidential hangers-on in one of the rooms. He was most appalled that they were spitting on the White House floor, and wrote that he hoped the spittle-cleaning servants were paid well.
Now, that’s a good anecdote. I love the print version, but now I wonder what a world I’ve been missing by ignoring the online Britannica.
Winchell, Walter
The famous fast-talking, hat-wearing, pun-loving gossip columnist was born Walter Winchel—just one l in the last name. But someone accidentally added an extra l to “Winchel” on a theater marquee. Winchel liked it so much he kept it. Likewise, Ulysses Grant had a superfluous S inserted into the middle of his name on his West Point papers. He kept it. And a man named Israel Baline changed his name to Irving Berlin after a printer’s error rendered it Berlin (not a small error—let’s hope that printer switched careers soon after). Here again, luck changing history, though in a much less gloomy and devastating way.
Wise Men
The three Wise Men have been popping up in our lives recently. Or one of the three Wise Men, anyway. Julie and I are considering naming our son Jasper—no particular reason, we just like the name, and Julie nixed Mshweshwe and Ub. Jasper, we learned from one of our many baby name books, is a version of Gaspar, the name of one of the three Magi.
So our son will be named for a Wise Man. Maybe, we figure, it’ll make him a Wise Baby. And maybe—here’s a shocker—I can even impart a little wisdom of my own to the fellow. I actually think I have some.
The thing is, if I’m really being truthful with myself, Operation Britannica began as a bit of a lark. I figured I’d get some fun facts, have something to say at cocktail parties, increase my quirkiness factor, maybe learn a little about the nature of information. But wisdom? I didn’t really expect it.
And yet, surprisingly, wisdom was in there—lurking in those 44 million words. It occasionally hit me over the head (see Ecclesiastes). But mostly I got my wisdom from absorbing the Britannica as a whole. And the wisdom I absorbed is this:
I finally have faith that Homo sapiens—that bipedal mammal of the Chordata phylum with 1350 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity, a secondary palate, and a hundred thousand hairs per scalp—is a pretty good species. Yes, we have the capability to do horrible things. We have created poverty and war and Daylight Saving Time. But in the big sweep—over the past ten thousand years and thirty-three thousand pages—we’ve redeemed ourselves with our accomplishments. We’re the ones who came up with the Trevi fountain and Scrabble in braille and Dr. DeBakey’s artificial heart and the touch-tone phone.
We have made our lives better. A thousand times better. Never again will I mythologize the past as some sort of golden age. Remember: In the 19th century, the mortality rate was 75 percent for a cesarean section, so my friend Jenny might no longer be around. The workday was fourteen hours, which is too long even for a workaholic like me. The life expectancy in ancient Rome was twenty-nine years. Widows had to marry their late husband’s brother. Originally forks had one tine, and umbrellas were available only in black, and you ate four-day-old fetid meat for dinner.
For all its terrifying problems, now is the best time to be alive. I’m excited for my son, Jasper, to be born. I can’t wait—and not just because he’ll be a cool accessory to have on my hip, like a new two-way pager, but because I think he’ll like the world, and the world will like him.
The facts in my brain will fade—I know that. But this wisdom, this perspective, I hope will stay with me.
Wood, Grant
The painter of the famous American Gothic portrait. I learn that the man and woman aren’t a farmer and his wife. The woman is Wood’s sister, Nan. And the farmer with the pitchfork? Wood’s dentist. It’s true, now that I look at him: put a white coat on him, and he screams D.D.S. Plus, he looks at home with that sharp implement, so that’s a cue.
Woodhull, Victoria
I figured by this point, after a year of nonstop reading, I’d be pretty well sick of the activity. I figured I wouldn’t want to read another book post-Britannica. I figured I wouldn’t want to read a stop sign or salad dressing label. And yet, when I learn about someone like Victoria Woodhull, I feel like I’d like to dive into an entire biography on her. Odd.
Woodhull was an amazing woman—the first female stockbroker and the first woman to run for president, among other things. Born in Ohio in 1838, she spent her childhood traveling with her family’s fortune-telling business. She married at age fifteen, divorced soon after, and moved to New York. There, she befriended robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was a fan of psychics. Vanderbilt helped her start a stock brokerage firm. (Seems like a good idea—a psychic stock picker.)
In the following years, Woodhull drifted further into fringe causes. She began publishing a reform magazine that advocated communal living, free love, equal rights, and women’s suffrage. The eccentric Woodhull wasn’t popular with the more staid members of the women’s suffrage movement, but they accepted her, at least temporarily, after she pleaded for the women’s vote before Congress.
Woodhull’s relationship with a reformer named Theodore Tilton led to national scandal. In what seems her sleaziest moment, Woodhull printed rumors that Tilton’s wife was having extramarital relations with Henry Ward Beecher. This got Woodhull indicted for sending improper material through the mails. (She was later acquitted.) In 1877, she moved to England—apparently with the financial help of Vanderbilt heirs, who feared she’d try to horn in on the will—where she started a journal of eugenics and offered a five-
thousand-dollar prize for the first transatlantic flight.
A curious and fascinating life. I did, in fact, order a Woodhull bio online. There will be at least one book in my post-Britannica existence.
X Y Z
X-ray style
This is an artistic technique in which you depict animals by painting their skeleton or internal organs. Mesolithic hunters in northern Europe loved their X-ray style, as did some early aboriginal Australians (Britannica’s got a funky-looking picture of an X-rayed-lizard painting from Australia). I’m reading this at night, just a few hours after one of the Esquire editors suggested we do an X-ray photo portfolio—an X ray of a guy hitting a golf ball, an X ray of a guy and a woman in bed. Will this be my last eerie Britannica-and-life intersection? Could be. I can see those Zs at the end of the tunnel. I’m that close.
yacht
The presidential yacht—a massive boat called the Mayflower, built in 1897—saw active service during World War II. I like that—a battling yacht. It’d be good to send Barry Diller’s yacht to the Persian Gulf.
Yang, Franklin
A Chinese-born American physicist who won the Nobel in 1957. Yang was born with the first name Chen Ning, but switched it to Franklin after reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin as a kid. If you’re going to name yourself after someone, Franklin’s a solid choice. The founding father has surfaced dozens of times in the Britannica, almost always in a flattering light—he founded the American Philosophical Society when he was twenty-one, started the first insurance in our country, discredited a quack named Franz Mesmer who allegedly put people in trances (hence the word “mesmerize”). On the other hand, Franklin did satisfy his libido with “low women.”