Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  STOOL SAMPLE

  Police in Newark, Ohio, arrested 28-year-old Kile Wygle for drunk driving in March 2009. But Wygle wasn’t driving a car—he was driving a motorized bar stool, which he had built himself. (It’s powered by a lawn mower engine.) Adding insult to injury was the fact that Wygle was the one who called police. He was riding his stool—drunk—at 20 mph. He lost control, fell off, and called 911 for medical assistance. Instead of paramedics, police arrived.

  THE BRIDE WILL KEEP HER LAST NAME

  In February 2009, a 20-year-old Florida woman named Kelly Hildebrandt did a search on the Internet for anybody with the same name as hers and found just one: a 20-year-old man in Lubbock, Texas. So she wrote him a note, and then he wrote back. After three weeks of increasingly flirtatious e-mails, he went to Coral Springs, Florida, to meet her in person. And in October 2009…Kelly Hildebrandt married Kelly Hildebrandt.

  SEE YOU LATER, NAVIGATOR

  In the summer of 1972, the U.S. Air Force was in full crisis mode.

  The enemy had made significant technological advances,

  threatening all they had been fighting for. Russia?

  China? No, the “enemy” was the Navy.

  BATTLE FOR POSITION

  Rivalries within the military can help boost morale. But they can also waste a lot of money as each branch of the service competes for funding to support its own weapons systems, its own airplanes, and its own way of doing things. That was the case in 1972 with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.

  A Naval Research Laboratory team headed by physicist Roger Easton had been making huge strides toward a satellite-based navigation system that would cover the entire world, making it possible to navigate ships with incredible accuracy, land a missile within a few feet of its target, and, as one engineer put it, “drop five bombs into the same hole.”

  Even before the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, Easton had been working on a system in which dozens of satellites would broadcast time signals to Earth below. By comparing nanosecond differences in the arrival times of the satellites’ signals, a ground receiver could decipher exactly where it was, within a few feet. Combining the words “time” and “navigation,” Easton called his system “Timation.”

  LOST AND FOUND

  Timation’s benefits to the Navy were obvious. Although the military already had 43 different navigation systems, they were largely incompatible. Furthermore, there were entire expanses of ocean worldwide that weren’t covered by any of the systems, making it hard for the Navy to accurately navigate, track ships and airplanes, or find lost and shipwrecked sailors. By the early 1970s, the Navy had launched four satellites to test Easton’s ideas.

  As far as Air Force commanders were concerned, this would not do. They were, after all, the Air Force, and they jealously laid claim to anything that flew, hovered, or orbited. A challenge like this could not be left unanswered.

  COUNTERATTACK

  An Air Force response was already in the making. Months earlier they had convened a team of their own engineers, and then got in touch with a Raytheon engineer named Ivan Getting. For years, Getting had been telling anybody who’d listen about how an array of satellites could be used for navigation. One of the Air Force engineers remembered seeing Getting’s cocktail-napkin sketches of satellites beaming signals to receivers on the ground, so they brought him in to help them beat the Navy. They came up with a navigation concept they called the “621B System,” and in November 1972, the Air Force appointed a reluctant colonel and engineer named Bradford Parkinson to manage the program.

  By the following summer, the Air Force had a basic concept that seemed feasible, at least on paper. They had to get their system approved by the Department of Defense to have any hope of moving ahead of the more developed Navy plan. Parkinson managed to arrange a meeting with a key DOD committee to pitch it. The committee, knowing of the Navy’s program, voted no.

  REGROUP AND TRY AGAIN

  After the rejection, Parkinson was given a new task: Come up with a joint proposal with the Navy, and get the Army involved as well. He approached the task by first reviewing the plans in great detail over three months. His superiors pressured him to give preference to their 621B system, which made things difficult because it became clear that the Navy’s was a much better plan—it was more accurate, more likely to work over the entire globe, more stable even if a few satellites went bad, less vulnerable to attack, and less expensive. Suddenly, his job had become more political than technical. How was he going to get the Air Force and the Army to accept the Navy plan?

  Over the three-day Labor Day weekend, deliberately hosted in the empty Pentagon motel to get away from Air Force pressure, Parkinson’s committee made a few (mostly cosmetic) changes to Timation: They would solicit the Army’s input on the system and perform tests on Army bases to get that branch’s buy-in, and they would change the satellite’s signal format to the one proposed by the Air Force in the belief that it was marginally harder to jam by hostile forces. (That turned out to be true, but the Air Force format also turned out to be weaker, resulting in a loss of signal inside buildings, in forests, and under heavy cloud cover.) The Air Force would also administer the program. In truth, however, the heart of the system was still the Navy’s technology. In December of that year, the Department of Defense approved implementation of the program, and the renamed NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) would soon become a reality.

  SORE WINNERS

  Despite being given responsibility for the program, many of the Air Force brass were angry about the fact that development costs were going to come out of its budget, even though it would benefit all military branches and even civilians. But what really stuck in their collective craw was that their rival’s plan had won.

  The problem with engineers is that they’re often not very good at politics. While Easton focused on making the system work, he lost control of his brainchild, and then he lost recognition for it as well. Despite the fact that the United States Patent Office issued him patents for the systems he invented, the Air Force began writing him out of the history of the GPS, giving the credit to Parkinson, who did deserve credit for his management skills, and Ivan Getting, who didn’t deserve credit for anything except, as one account put it, “incubating GPS in his mind.”

  Sadly, the disinformation campaign worked. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Easton rarely appeared in the histories of GPS, and when he did, it was as in an “also contributed” footnote. Parkinson and Getting got the press, the awards, and the places in the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame; Easton continued quietly working in the Naval Research Lab.

  More than two decades passed before Easton started to get belated public recognition. In 1997 the American Philosophical Society jointly awarded its prestigious Magellanic Premium to Parkinson and Easton (no mention of Getting). Easton was presented with the 2004 National Medal of Technology, with President George W. Bush citing “his extensive pioneering achievements in spacecraft tracking, navigation, and timing technology that led to the development of the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS).”

  Despite that, many sources still slight Easton, citing Getting and Parkinson as the inventors of the GPS. So it’s not surprising that in his acceptance of the Magellanic Premium, Easton revealed a touch of hurt feelings, saying, “On the Labor Day weekend, 1973, the Air Force accepted the Navy technology for satellite positioning, and here I salute Dr. Parkinson for knowing a good technology when he sees it.”

  THEY’RE HEIRLESS

  Two of history’s most important men have no direct descendants.

  • William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins—a boy named Hamnet and a girl named Judith, born in 1585. Hamnet died of bubonic plague in 1596 at age 11. Judith married in 1616. She and her husband, winemaker Thomas Quiney, had three boys: Shakespeare Quiney, who died in infancy, and Richard and Thomas, who died at ages 21 and 20, respective
ly, having fathered no children. The line carried on only with Susanna, who married Dr. John Hall in 1607. Their only daughter, Elizabeth Hall, married but had no children. She, and the Shakespeare lineage, died in 1670.

  • Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, had four boys, but three died in childhood—Edward at age 4, Willie at 11, and Tad at 18. The only one to survive into adulthood was Robert Todd Lincoln (1843–1926), who served as secretary of war in the 1880s. He married Mary Harlan, daughter of an Iowa senator, in 1868, and they had three children: daughters Mary “Mamie” (b. 1869) and Jessie (b. 1875), and a son, Abraham II, nicknamed Jack (b. 1873). Abraham II died at age 16. Mamie married and had a son named Lincoln Isham in 1892. A musician, farmer, and socialite, he died in 1971, childless. Jessie married athlete Warren Beckwith in 1897. They had a daughter, Mary, and a son, Robert, neither of whom had any children. Robert Beckwith, the last direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln, died at age 71 in 1985.

  THE NEW DEAL

  A massive government effort to get people back to work and

  restart the economy, the New Deal had its detractors, then

  and now. But it remains one of the most popular and

  effective government programs in American history.

  CRASH AND BURN

  In October 1929, during the first year of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, the U.S. stock market crashed. By 1933 unemployment had climbed from 4 percent to 25 percent, plunging the nation into the Great Depression. Hoover, a Republican, took a lot of the blame for it and was beaten by a landslide in his 1932 reelection bid by the Democratic candidate, former New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR promised Americans a “New Deal”—sweeping government intervention to revive the economy, and new laws to make sure the collapse was never repeated. His legislation was quickly passed through Democrat-controlled Congress.

  Although heavily criticized at the time as socialism or even communism, the New Deal put millions of Americans back to work, provided security to senior citizens, and in the process helped to stabilize the American economy. Most importantly, it gave Americans hope. Here’s a look at some of the many agencies created in the New Deal to institute Roosevelt’s reforms.

  Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The first relief agency of the New Deal, it provided emergency welfare and aid. More than $3 billion was allocated to states and cities for homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and vaccinations, as well as literacy training and free childcare for job-seeking parents. FERA also provided temporary work for as many as 20 million people—construction and maintenance jobs, such as repairing public buildings, laying sewer pipe, and raking leaves for $15 per week. The agency was terminated in 1935, and its projects were absorbed into other programs.

  National Recovery Administration. The aim of the NRA was to stimulate economic recovery by asking businesses to set a 40-cents-per-hour minimum wage and standardizing the work week at 40 hours for white-collar jobs and 36 for blue-collar. More than 23 million people worked under NRA-abiding companies, but violations of the code were common. Also, participation by firms was voluntary, so the agency really didn’t have a lot of authority. In 1935 the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional because the federal government had overstepped state labor laws. Nevertheless, minimum-wage and work-hour laws were later passed by Congress.

  Civilian Conservation Corps. Not only did the CCC raise awareness of the importance of preserving natural resources, but in doing so it created 250,000 conservation, forestry, and land improvement jobs in 2,600 locations. Nicknamed by workers “Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” CCC workers planted more than three billion trees from 1933 to 1942, accounting for half of all organized planting in American history. But “conservation” meant a lot of things for the CCC—workers constructed fire towers, built 100,000 miles of fire roads, fought and prevented wildfires, preserved wildlife habitats, controlled floods, and prevented soil erosion. One clever element of the CCC was how it reallocated labor surpluses to areas where there were labor shortages. American cities had far too many needy workers, so the CCC moved them to sparsely populated rural areas, where there was work to be done and few to do it.

  Public Works Administration. In one of the first New Deal programs enacted in 1933, the government allocated $4 billion for the construction of what was ultimately 34,000 projects, including airports, highways, aircraft carriers, bridges (including San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge), hospitals, and schools. By June 1934, the PWA had planned all of its projects and allocated all of its money. So in 1935, Congress created a new agency called the Works Progress Administration to develop more civic construction and job creation programs in the same vein.

  Works Progress Administration. Picking up where the PWA left off, the WPA employed 8.5 million people between 1935 and ’43 at an average wage of $2 per day for civic construction projects, such as roads (650,000 miles), bridges (78,000), buildings (125,000), and 700 miles of airport runways. The WPA was the nation’s largest “employer” at the time, and the largest New Deal agency—it spent $11 billion over its life span. Some WPA projects still in existence: Dealey Plaza in Dallas (where John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963), LaGuardia Airport in New York, Timberline Lodge in Oregon, and the presidential retreat Camp David (which was initially a resort for all federal employees). One notable branch of the agency was the Arts Program, which hired thousands of artists, musicians, actors, photographers, and writers to use their talents for public works. For example, future major authors Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison wrote state guidebooks, and painter Jackson Pollock produced murals.

  Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. During the Depression, consumers lost faith in banks. Many had failed and closed suddenly, and their customers’ money was irretrievably lost. But banks are an important part of the financial system—no modern economy can function without them. Created by the Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act of 1933, the FDIC restored faith in banks with a government-backed insurance policy on deposits. If a bank failed, a consumer’s account was insured up to $5,000. (Today, the guarantee is $250,000.)

  Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In order to increase the market price of crops and livestock, and thereby make farms financially stable again, there had to be either a greater demand or less supply. The AAA paid farmers a subsidy to grow less. The AAA opened in May 1933, by which point the year’s crops were already planted. Since it was too late to pay farmers not to plant, the agency destroyed existing stockpiles and reduced the size of livestock herds. Twenty-five percent of the nation’s cotton fields were razed, and six million piglets and 220,000 pregnant cows were slaughtered. Destroying crops while so many Americans struggled to put food on the table made the AAA very controversial. Besides, it didn’t work—large farms benefited most; they simply evicted tenant farmers and sharecroppers, let the land go fallow, then collected a fee from the government. And by 1937, wholesale food prices hadn’t changed much from before the AAA went into effect.

  Federal Housing Administration. During the Depression, home mortgages were mostly short-term—about 3 to 5 years, as opposed to the 30-year standard of today. The FHA, born out of the National Housing Act of 1934, regulated interest rates and mortgage terms so home ownership was more within reach for middle-and low-income families. The agency also helped to ensure that enough affordable housing existed for purchase by offering loans for home-building companies, which had suffered greatly in the economic downturn.

  Securities and Exchange Commission. Fraud, deception, and insider trading contributed to the stock market crash, so in an attempt to make sure it never happened again, Congress passed the Securities Exchange Act in 1934. In addition to requiring disclosure of a company’s financial information and dealings to investors, it made securities (stock) fraud a crime and established the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its five commissioners are appointed by the president to police the financial world.

  National Labor Relations Board. Created by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the boar
d’s purpose was to protect and enhance the rights of workers to organize into unions and collectively bargain for better wages and better working conditions.

  Farm Security Administration. Formed by the Resettlement Administration Act of 1935, this agency delivered aid to the nearly one million farm families who’d fled the Dust Bowl agricultural disaster in Arkansas and Oklahoma for California, as well as those evicted by farm bosses after AAA subsidies. The FSA purchased ruined farms from victims of the Dust Bowl and relocated the farmers to 34 government-owned group farms, where they grew food for themselves while learning modern techniques from agriculture scientists. The FSA also set up refugee camps for farmers and provided educational grants to farm families. But the most famous project of the FSA was its photography branch—it sent out photographers, most notably Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, to document the plight of the Depression-era farmers.

  Social Security Administration. The SSA provided financial assistance for single mothers, a free food program for children of low-income families, and unemployment insurance. But most famously, the SSA created and managed a federal pension system for retired people. Not only did it allow aging citizens to retire from the workforce (without starving), it also opened up their jobs to new workers. Social Security payments were financed by a payroll tax, and they still are: It remains in effect today, covering 40 million people and accounting for a quarter of the federal budget.