ESCAPING TO HIS LAB
So Tillotson built a makeshift laboratory in his attic and set about trying to invent something that might let him start his own business. The problem was that the only thing Tillotson knew well was rubber, and making the vulcanized rubber invented by Charles Goodyear required expensive machinery, lots of raw materials, and workers.
Tillotson pinned his hopes on something new in the field: liquid latex. A few years earlier, German scientist Peter Schidrowitz had developed a thick liquid that could be painted onto almost anything and would air dry into a rubber skin. It didn’t require heat, sulfur, or molding machines, just a paintbrush or a dipping bowl, which made it theoretically possible for Tillotson to start manufacturing something (he wasn’t sure what yet) with a few molds and minimal up-front costs. But what could he make?
AIR HEAD
Back at Hood Rubber, Tillotson had been lucky: He’d been allocated a supply of liquid latex and assigned the job of finding uses for it, so he already knew something about what it could do. He’d also had the opportunity to take home a quantity of liquid latex before the plant locked its doors.
His first idea was to create inexpensive inner tubes for automobile and bicycle tires. On paper, it seemed like it should work, but Tillotson quickly discovered that his latex skin wasn’t as strong as molded rubber, and it wasn’t durable enough for heavy-duty use. His first efforts were, quite literally, a blowout.
Frustrated, Tillotson came up with another idea—one that he thought might be an amusing novelty. He cut a piece of cardboard into the shape of a cat’s head (complete with little cat ears at the top) and dipped it into the gooey latex. He had no idea what would happen, but it was a whimsical diversion from working on inner tubes. After the latex dried, he sprinkled it with talc to keep the rubber from sticking to itself, then carefully rolled the thin skin off the cardboard. It seemed to be an intact cat-head shape. Gingerly, he put it to his lips and blew a small puff of air into the hole at the bottom. It seemed to be airtight, so he blew a little more and kept repeating until the latex skin was round and dangerously taut. It was a balloon with cat ears, something he’d never seen before.
BALLOONS FROM THE BUTCHER
Not that toy balloons were anything new. For a great kids’ toy in the early 1800s, you couldn’t do much better than blowing up a pig’s bladder: It was thin, airtight, durable, and fun to toss around. Kids who wanted a different-size balloon had plenty of choices available, from small balloons made from pig intestines or rabbit bladders to large balloons from cattle organs.
In 1824 British scientist Michael Faraday invented a rubber balloon by taking two pieces of rubber and sticking them together. It didn’t require special adhesives because before Charles Goodyear invented vulcanization to fix the problem, rubber was sticky and malleable like a thick bubble gum. Faraday filled his balloon with hydrogen in order to conduct scientific experiments, but it didn’t take long for the invention to become a popular plaything for his kids. Problems: The balloons couldn’t be mass-produced, and they didn’t last long.
A CAT KISS FOR LUCK
Tillotson had something new, and he knew it. He tied off the balloon and hand painted a cat’s face on the front. When he carried it downstairs to show the rest of the family, their reaction was enough to make him completely forget about inner tubes. He went to work with his scissors, creating more cat-head molds, and recruited his brother and father-in-law to help hand dip dozens at a time. After making and painting 2,000, he sold them all to a Boston novelty company, C. Decieco & Son, who filled them with helium to sell at a parade in nearby Lexington.
Desperately curious to see how the public would respond to his cat balloons, Tillotson headed to the parade site. Besides being reassured by the brisk sales of balloons, he witnessed something that convinced him that he had a hit product on his hands: A little girl pulled her balloon down and kissed the cat’s face.
That was it. Tillotson withdrew his life savings and sank the entire $720 into latex, molds, and a building, and set up production. By the end of 1931, the Tillotson Rubber Company had popped out five million cat-faced balloons and, despite the worsening Depression, generated sales of $85,000 (the equivalent of $1.2 million today).
Other companies also began making balloons and plenty of other rubbery products. Tillotson’s company went on to develop the first high-speed latex dipping machine, which helped with his second invention in the early 1960s: the one-size-fits-either-hand disposable latex medical glove.
FOOTNOTE TO OBSCURITY
Tillotson became fabulously wealthy, moved to Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, and bought a hotel. There he earned his final claim to fame: For 40 years, until his death in 2001 at age 102, he was the nation’s first voter in all presidential primaries and all presidential elections. He slid his paper ballot into Dixville Notch’s ballot box at the stroke of midnight every Election Day, followed quickly by the three dozen other registered voters in the tiny town. Dixville Notch became famous as the first place to vote and the first to report its results a few minutes later, resulting in a crush of reporters and television cameras at every election.
Tillotson always ended up in the network news reports. But did that give him the fame he deserved as the inventor of the modern balloon and the disposable surgical glove? No. In 2007 the New Hampshire Historical Society began selling a Neil Tillotson bob-blehead figure…depicting the staunch Republican dropping his ballot into the Dixville Notch ballot box. (Want one? At last report, they still have plenty on hand.)
LONGEST-RUNNING SITCOMS IN TV HISTORY
• The Simpsons (1989–present), 441 episodes (and counting)
• The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–66), 435 episodes
• My Three Sons (1960–72), 380 episodes
• The Danny Thomas Show (1953–64), 336 episodes
• Burns and Allen (1950–58) 291, episodes
• Cheers (1982–93), 275 episodes
• The Donna Reed Show (1958–66), 275 episodes
• The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71), 274 episodes
• Frasier (1993-2004), 264 episodes
• Married...With Children (1987–97), 259 episodes
TALK TO THE BONES
TV shows like CSI and Bones make forensic science seem commonplace, but
30 years ago, one man took the practice from an obscure academic specialty
to the frontlines of international crime and human rights investigations.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE BONES
Clyde Snow stands over six feet tall, wears a cowboy hat and leather boots, and chain-smokes Cuban cigars. He drinks a lot, too. He’s been described as “an unmade bed of a man.” He doesn’t look like an angel or a savior, but that’s what many people think he is—people who’ve lost loved ones, especially children and grandchildren. He hardly ever has happy news for relatives, though; it’s rare that a case he’s involved in turns up a living person. In fact, the person is usually long dead, maybe even for decades. Snow has little more than bones—often buried in unmarked plots; sometimes in mass graves—with which to identify who people were and how they died. He says the bones “make good witnesses. They may speak softly, but they never forget.” He calls his work osteobiography, the art and science of reading a person’s bones. “There is,” he says, “a brief but very informative biography contained within the skeleton, if you know how to read it.”
MEASURING THE PAST
Forensics is the application of any science in a criminal or legal investigation. Forensic anthropology focuses on human skeletal remains. The long bones of the leg, for example, can determine height and weight, the bones in the arms and hands can tell whether the deceased was left- or right-handed, skull measurements can determine sex and race, and measurements of the back of the skull can determine age at time of death. In addition, forensic anthropologists can identify old fractures, scarring from wounds, and deformities from disease.
And sometimes they can determine the ca
use of death. Once, when investigating human rights abuses at a youth detention facility in Bolivia, Snow found metal residue from a .22 caliber rifle bullet on a boy’s ribcage, indicating he’d been shot in the back, probably by a guard. Another boy had a bullet wound in a his skull, but Snow determined it wasn’t the actual shot that killed him; it was lead poisoning from the bullet fragment that remained in his head. It’s this kind of work that makes Snow and the other anthropologists he’s trained during his long career the forensic experts of last resort, when there’s no blood, soft tissue, or even teeth. “Bones can be puzzles,” he says. “But they never lie.”
PLANE SPEAKER
Born in 1928, Clyde Snow grew up in rural West Texas, the son of a country doctor. He was used to looking at bones at an early age as he accompanied his father on patient visits. He got his Master’s Degree in Zoology and eventually a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He wound up based in Oklahoma City in 1960 when an old friend offered him a job in a new field—investigating casualties of airline crashes to help design safer airplanes at the Civil Aeromedical Institute, a subsidiary of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). One of the most important parts of his job was recreating what happened during an airline crash by studying the human remains at crash sites. By determining what passengers did before and during impact, he could learn where and how safety improvements could be incorporated into planes.
This combination of physical anthropology and the study of human behavior appealed to Snow, and he started offering his services to the local medical examiner’s office. From the 1960s through the 1990s, if there were hard-to-identify victims anywhere in the United States, law enforcement called Clyde Snow.
FACES AND PLACES
Snow worked on some of the most notorious cases of the 20th century, including the serial killings of Ted Bundy, identifying the skull of notorious Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele, reviewing the autopsy X-rays from John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and identifying victims of the 1995 terrorist bombings in Oklahoma City. He traveled to the Little Big Horn to try and identify soldiers who died with Custer, and to Bolivia to see if the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were buried there (they weren’t). For a NASA study about what happened to bones after a high-altitude fall, he interviewed survivors of suicide jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. (He says most of the survivors had a change of mind on the way down.) Here are some of his best-known cases:
American Airlines Flight 191: On May 25, 1979, the deadliest airline crash in American history killed all 258 passengers, 13 crew, and 2 bystanders on the ground in Chicago. Clyde Snow was called to a makeshift morgue in a hangar at O’Hare International Airport to try to identify what were essentially the unidentifiable remains of the 50 people whose bodies had not been accounted for. He worked 16-hour days with a team of medical investigators, dentists, and X-ray technicians examining more than 10,000 body parts. Snow had to create new forensic techniques on the spot, including designing the first computer database that matched information compiled from the bones with what was known about missing passengers. Over a five-week period, they identified 20 more people—an amazing outcome, considering the condition of the remains.
Serial Killer John Wayne Gacy: In 1980 Gacy was convicted of murdering 33 young men who had been found the year before, buried beneath his home in a Chicago suburb or dumped in a nearby river. The victims were not easy to identify—they were all young white males—and many were probably runaways or drifters. Using missing persons reports, dental records, X-rays, and fingerprints, police could identify only half of them.
Snow was called in by the medical examiner’s office, and with the help of a forensic radiologist, they managed to identify five more victims over the next few months. But after a year, there were still nine unidentified bodies. Rather than give up, Snow enlisted the aid of medical artist Betty Pat Gatlieff to undertake the very new practice of facial reconstruction. Using Snow’s precise measurements, Gatlieff painstakingly sculpted clay onto various points of each skull, recreating the nose, cheeks and mouth, and later adding prosthetic eyes and a wig. Though only one of the nine victims was identified from the recreations, the technique was further refined by Snow and Gatlieff and used successfully many times since, leading to about a 70% identification rate.
Argentina and the Disappeared: A turning point in Snow’s career came in 1984 when he was alerted to the plight of relatives of desaparecidos (the disappeared)—thousands of people who were abducted and killed by Argentina’s military junta between 1976 and 1983. Many of the bodies had been dumped in unmarked graves, and now, with a new government in power, there was an outcry from the public to try to locate the missing. Snow originally went to Argentina as part of a group advising officials how to properly exhume and identify remains, but his involvement quickly became more hands-on. He agreed to work directly on a couple of cases, and when he couldn’t find enough professionals, he trained a team of six anthropology and medical students from the University of Buenos Aires. Over the next two years, they worked on dozens of exhumations together, and were able to identify the bodies of numerous desaparecidos.
A NEW ERA
Snow’s work in Argentina went beyond merely identifying bodies; it marked the first time forensics were used to bring human-rights criminals to justice. At the 1985 trial of nine former Junta officials, Snow showed dozens of slides documenting atrocities—a sternum that clearly showed a victim had been shot in the back, a skull with fragments of shotgun pellets that had come from a standard police weapon at close range, and the skeleton of a young woman whose pelvis showed clear signs of having given birth shortly before her death. With Snow’s help, the bones of three victims spoke loud and clear—and five of the nine defendants were convicted. Snow’s work in Argentina has led to nearly 25 years of organized humanitarian investigations by himself and other forensic scientists, in countries such as Guatemala, Ethiopia, Iraq, Bolivia, the Philippines, Chile, and the former Yugoslavia.
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF
From 1961 to ’62, Clyde Snow developed statistical models of airline crashes that combined anthropological measurements with seating charts and statements from survivors. His shocking conclusion: Young men were twice as likely to survive as older men, women, and children. Why? “They do not act like gentlemen,” Snow concluded. In other words, they didn’t help others get out. Families traveling together helped each other, but strangers, for the most part, didn’t help other strangers—even children.
ENGLAND’S ROSWELL, PART II
What really did happen in Rendlesham Forest in the wee hours
of the morning on December 26 and 28, 1980? Here’s the
second installment of the story. Part I is on page 373.
NOT SO FAST
For the witnesses of the strange goings-on in Rendlesham
Forest, convincing themselves that they’d seen a UFO was one thing—convincing the locals was another. When the story finally broke in the pages of the News of the World, a British tabloid newspaper, in October 1983, the farmers and foresters who lived around Rendlesham Forest didn’t believe a word of it. They hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual on the nights in question, and when a reporter from the Times of London visited the area the day the News of the World story broke, he had no trouble finding locals who were already laughing off some of the key elements of the story.
DUMB YANKEES
Had the American airmen ever even been in a forest before?
• Depressions in the ground of the kind described by the witnesses at the “landing site” are scattered all over the forest—not always arranged by chance into triangular patterns, but they are everywhere. Rabbits dig them, to get at roots under the ground.
• The strange marks in the trees? They were everywhere, too, not just at the landing sight. They weren’t burns or scrapes made by a UFO blasting off—they were axe marks made by foresters to mark the trees that are ready to be cut down.
• The screaming animals?
Those were muntjac, also called “barking deer,” who live in Rendlesham Forest and are well known—at least to the locals—for squeaking, barking, and even screaming like human beings when startled by things like, say, bands of agitated airmen roaming through the forest at 3:00 a.m. waving flashlights and talking loudly into tape recorders as they troll for space aliens.
LARGER THAN (EXTRATERRESTRIAL) LIFE
By now the story was taking on a life of its own, helped along by the fact that the original witness statements, though unclassified, still hadn’t been made public. They were gathering dust in an Air Force filing cabinet somewhere. Only the Halt memo had been leaked to the News of the World.
Without their original written statements to pin them down, some of the witnesses apparently began to embellish their stories. Remember how Jim Penniston reported that the closest he ever came to the object was 50 yards, or half a football field, away? In time he would claim that he not only walked right up to the craft, he examined it for 45 minutes before it finally took off, and he took notes and drew diagrams into a small notebook the entire time. John Burroughs was with Penniston, and he denies this version of the story. He says that neither of them got close to the source of the lights. He also denies that Penniston took notes. But that hasn’t stopped Penniston from producing such a notebook, complete with handwritten notes and sketches of the spacecraft, in television interviews ever since.
Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader Page 58