Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (Bathroom Readers)

by Bathroom Readers' Hysterical Society

  1880: Trouble in Tokyo! There’s been a burglary, and an innocent man has been blamed for the heist! In steps Scottish physician and missionary Henry Faulds, who uses fingerprints not only to clear the accused, but also to help bring the actual criminal to justice. Faulds writes about using fingerprints for crime-solving in the science journal Nature, and then spends the next couple of decades in a nasty little letter-writing spat with one Sir William Herschel, about which of the two of them thought up the idea first. (Herschel—not to be confused with the other Sir William Herschel, the guy who discovered Uranus—concedes the point, finally, in 1917.)

  1887: Everyone’s favorite fictional master of forensics, Sherlock Holmes, makes his debut.

  1892: Sir Francis Galton of Great Britain publishes Fingerprints, the first book to codify fingerprint patterns and show how to use them in solving crimes. Meanwhile, in Argentina, police investigator Juan Vucetich develops a fingerprinting classification system based on Galton’s work and uses it to accuse a mother of murdering her two sons and then slitting her own throat to make it look like the work of someone else. Seems she left bloody fingerprints on a doorpost. That’ll teach her.

  1901: Human blood groups are identified and described by Austrian doctor Karl Landsteiner, who subsequently codified his discoveries into the blood types we know today. This discovery was useful in the field of forensics (to help identify criminals by the blood they might leave at the crime scene), as well as in medicine in general, and it lands Landsteiner a Nobel Prize in 1930.

  1903: The first academic program for forensic science is created at University of Lausanne, Switzerland, by Professor R. A. Reiss.

  1905: Teddy Roosevelt creates the FBI. He was president at the time. He could do that.

  1910: Rosella Rousseau confesses to the murder of Germaine Bichon. Why? Because her hair is matched to hairs at the crime scene, a technique pioneered by Victor Balthazard, a professor of forensic medicine at the Sorbonne. The same year, another French professor of forensic medicine, Edmund Locard, helps to create the first police crime lab. The first U.S. crime lab was founded in 1925 by Los Angeles police chief August Vollmer.

  1921: The portable polygraph (lie detector) is invented. In 1923 polygraph testimony is ruled inadmissible in U.S. courts.

  1925: Blood’s not the only bodily fluid you can type, suggested Japanese scientist K. I. Yosida, as he undertook studies to determine serological isoantibodies in other body fluids. He’s right.

  1960: An arsonist’s job gets harder as gas chromatography is used for the first time in a lab to identify specific petroleum products.

  1976: Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman as a feisty L.A. coroner, debuts and runs through 1983. The character of Quincy is allegedly based on real-life Los Angeles “Coroner to the Stars” Thomas Noguchi, who presided over the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy, and played a significant role in the investigation of the Manson family murders. The physical resemblance between Klugman and Noguchi is enigmatic at best.

  1977: Japanese forensic scientist Fuseo Matsumur notices his fingerprints popping up as he prepares a slide for examination and tells his friend Masato Soba. Soba would use this information to help develop the first process to raise latent prints with cyanoacrylate, or, as it’s more commonly known, superglue. Yes, superglue. Now you know why not to get it on your fingers.

  1984: Yes, 1984. An ironic year for the first successful DNA profiling test, created by Great Britain’s Sir Alec Jeffreys.

  1986: Jeffreys uses his DNA profiling method to help convict the ominously named Colin Pitchfork for murder. Interestingly, in this same case DNA is used to clear another man accused of the crime.

  1987: DNA profiling makes its debut in the United States and nails Tommy Lee Andrews for a number of sexual assaults in Orlando, Florida. However, in the same year, the admissibility of DNA profiling is challenged in another case, New York v. Castro, in which the defendant was accused of murder. This set the stage for many years of back and forth argument on the standards and practices of the labs that perform DNA profiling.

  1991: Silence of the Lambs is released, starring Jodie Foster as an FBI investigator who uses forensic techniques to track down a serial killer, and Anthony Hopkins as the oddly genteel cannibal who helps her. Foster becomes the first actress to win an Oscar for playing an FBI agent; Hopkins becomes the first actor to win an Oscar for playing a character that has a good friend for lunch with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

  1996: In Tennessee a fellow named Paul Ware is accused of murder, but the only physical evidence is a few hairs. Investigators use those hairs to extract DNA from mitochondria, a small structure within human cells. Mitochondrial DNA is different from DNA found in a cell’s nucleus. Since there are quite a few mitochondria in every human cell, the amount of mitochondrial DNA to work with is larger. The mitochondrial DNA in the hairs is a match for Ware’s. Ware is serving a life term in prison. It’s the first use of mitochondrial DNA to convict someone of a crime.

  2001: Not one but two shows about forensic scientists hit the TV: the redundantly titled CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Crossing Jordan. None of the stars look remotely like Thomas Noguchi.

  2005: There were at least a dozen new forensic TV shows, including the additions of CSI: Miami and CSI: New York based on the success of the original Crime Scene Investigation.

  Castle Grande

  Was it the world’s most expensive private residence . . . or the world’s biggest white elephant? Luckily, California’s Hearst Castle is open for public tours. Pay it a visit and see for yourself.

  OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY

  In 1894 William Randolph Hearst, age 31, a member of one of California’s wealthiest families and the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, commissioned an architect to build a mansion on a large tract of land in Pleasanton, California.

  Somehow he never got around to telling the owner—his mother—he was building himself a house on her property. When she found out, she took it and kept it for herself. There wasn’t much William could do about it—his mother, the widow of U.S. senator George Hearst, controlled the family’s entire $20 million fortune. William hadn’t inherited a penny of his father’s estate and had nothing in his own name, not even the Examiner. His mother owned that, too.

  Twenty-five years later, Hearst, now 56, wanted to build a hilltop house on the 60,000-acre ranch his mother owned in San Simeon, a small coastal whaling town halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hearst was fond of camping with his family and an entourage of as many as 50 guests and servants at the site, but wanted something “a little more comfortable.”

  A SLIGHT CHANGE IN PLANS

  By now Hearst was well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful publishers in the country . . . but his mother still controlled the family fortune. He must have learned something from his 1894 experience, because he told his mother about the plan for San Simeon before he started construction, and he limited himself to a single tiny “Jappo-Swisso bungalow.” Mrs. Hearst agreed to let him build, but insisted on keeping the property in her name because, she explained, “I’m afraid he might get carried away.” She had good reason to worry.

  Just a few months later, in April 1919, Hearst’s mother died of influenza. William, her only son, inherited everything . . . and began rethinking his simple bungalow. He told architect Julia Morgan that he wanted something a little bigger.

  “I don’t think it was a month before we were going on a grand scale,” Morgan’s employee Walter Steilberg remembered. The bungalow quickly evolved into a large house . . . then a mansion . . . and finally one enormous mansion called Casa Grande, surrounded by three smaller “cottages”—Casa del Sol, Casa del Mar, and Casa del Monte—giving the hilltop retreat the appearance of an entire Mediterranean hill town.

  Hearst called it La Cuesta Encantata, “The Enchanted Hill.” To the public, it would become known as Hearst Castle.

  AN UPHILL BATTLE

  That was
the plan, but as Julia Morgan explained to Hearst, bringing the large project to completion would not be easy or cheap. For one thing, there was no paved road and the rocky, barren spot where Hearst wanted to build was 1,600 feet up, which meant there was no easy way to get construction materials to the site. And with no topsoil, there was no way to plant the trees and gardens Hearst wanted, either. Furthermore, San Simeon was in the middle of nowhere, which meant that skilled workers would have to be brought in from hundreds of miles away and housed and fed on-site.

  None of this mattered to Hearst. He’d loved San Simeon since childhood, and for the first time in his life he had the money to build his dream house. Nothing was going to get in his way. The dirt trail up the hill was paved; the pier in the town of San Simeon was enlarged to allow steamships to unload construction materials; dormitories were constructed for the workers; and tons of topsoil were hauled up to the site, enough to bury 50 acres of land under four feet of dirt. Construction began in 1919 . . . and was still underway more than 30 years later, when Hearst died in August 1951.

  SALE OF THE CENTURY

  While Morgan was working on the building plans, Hearst was hard at work indulging what his mother had once described as his “mania for antiquities”—he spent millions of dollars acquiring entire trainloads of antiques to furnish and decorate the 165 rooms—including 56 bedrooms and 19 sitting rooms—and the 61 bathrooms that made up his estate. His timing was perfect: cash-strapped European governments were instituting income and estate taxes to finance rebuilding in the aftermath of World War I. Once-wealthy families found themselves having to auction off artwork, antiques, and even entire castles, monasteries, and country estates to raise cash to pay their taxes. Hearst was their biggest customer.

  RECYCLED MATERIALS

  Hearst was especially fond of acquiring “architectural fragments”—floors, doorways, windows, mantles, chimneys, etc.—that could be carted off to San Simeon and set into the concrete walls of his estate. For more than 20 years, he compulsively bought just about everything that caught his eye and shipped it across the Atlantic to warehouses in the Bronx; from there most of it was sent by rail to warehouses in San Simeon.

  Hearst peppered Julia Morgan with suggestions on which artifacts should go where, and none of these treasures were too sacred to be “improved” if need be. If something was too small, Morgan had it enlarged; if it was too big, she had it chopped down to size. “So far we have received from Hearst, to incorporate into the new buildings, some 12 or 13 railroad cars of antiques,” Morgan wrote in 1920:

  They comprise vast quantities of tables, beds, armoires, secretaries, all kinds of cabinets, church statuary, columns, door frames, carved doors in all stages of repair and disrepair, over-altars, reliquaries, lanterns, iron grille doors, window grilles, votive candlesticks, torchères, all kinds of chairs in quantity, door trims, wooden carved ceilings . . . I don’t see myself where we are ever going to use half suitably, but I find that the idea is to try things out and if they are not satisfactory, discard them for the next thing that comes that promises better.

  THE COLLECTOR

  Not all of this booty ended up at Hearst Castle—Hearst owned a castle in Wales, a beachfront mansion in Santa Monica, a 50,000-acre estate near Mt. Shasta in the northern part of California, and more. But he bought more antiques, artworks, and architectural fragments than even these buildings could hold; to this day thousands of his purchases sit in their original packing crates in Hearst Corporation warehouses around the country.

  COMPANY’S COMING

  By the mid-1920s, enough of the construction had been completed at San Simeon to allow Hearst to begin entertaining guests as diverse as Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Calvin Coolidge, and George Bernard Shaw. He provided them with plenty to do: hiking, trout fishing, horseback riding, and tennis; there was also a billiard room, library, movie theater, and indoor and outdoor swimming pools. If guests wanted to play golf, there was even an airplane standing by to fly them to the nearest course. If they wanted to look at elephants, giraffes, or other exotic animals, that wasn’t a problem either: Hearst’s estate was also home to the largest privately owned zoo in the world.

  A FEW SMALL PROBLEMS

  When guests arrived at the estate, they quickly discovered that for all its grandeur, it wasn’t very comfortable. Some guest rooms gave up so much space to antiques and art that there wasn’t any room left for closets. The buildings could also be quite drafty, and the chimneys smoked terribly.

  Hearst’s peculiar quirks as host added to the discomfort. He didn’t believe in serving his guests breakfast in bed, or even bringing them coffee. There were no kitchens in the guest houses, so anyone who wanted something to eat had to get dressed and come to Casa Grande.

  The cocktail hour before dinner was another oddity. It could last as long as two hours or more, but Hearst served only one cocktail to each guest (two if you arrived early, drank quickly, and got lucky). Anyone caught smuggling their own liquor into San Simeon soon found their bags packed and set next to the car that was waiting to take them away.

  Rationing his booze may have come back to haunt Hearst in ways he could never have imagined: one of his most ungrateful guests was a hard-drinking writer named Herman Mankiewicz, who went on to cowrite the screenplay for Citizen Kane, a film about a “fictional” newspaper baron who lives in an enormous castle called Xanadu, an obvious blast at Hearst.

  Hearst was one of the wealthiest men in the country, but the Great Depression finally caught up with him in 1936; he found himself more than $100 million in debt at a time when newspaper circulation and advertising revenues were sharply off. At 74, he lost control of his business empire and was forced to sell off real estate, newspapers, and half of his art collection. He managed to hang on to San Simeon, but only by agreeing to halt construction and paying “rent” to his creditors until his financial situation improved.

  HE’S BA-A-ACK

  Hearst finally regained control in 1945 when he was 82, and immediately resumed construction at San Simeon. But Hearst’s health was deteriorating, and in 1947 he was forced to move to Los Angeles to be closer to his doctors. He never returned to his castle, and died in August 1951 at the age of 88.

  The Hearst Corporation directors were not nearly as infatuated with San Simeon as Hearst had been—they wanted to get rid of it. But nobody would buy it, because nobody could afford it.

  The company offered it to the University of California free of charge . . . but the university refused to accept the “gift” unless it was accompanied by a huge endowment to cover operating costs. Finally in 1958, the corporation donated the buildings and the surrounding land to the state of California, which now operates it as a tourist attraction.

  THE BIG QUESTION: HOW MUCH DID IT COST?

  William Randolph Hearst spent so much money so quickly over so many years that it’s difficult to calculate just how much he spent building and furnishing San Simeon. Guinness World Records estimates that he spent as much as $30 million (or about $277 million today). By contrast, Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s mansion cost only $60 million.

  That makes Hearst Castle easily the most expensive private residence ever built . . . and it’s still unfinished.

  “I do not seek, I find.” —Picasso

  The Adventures of Eggplant

  Mix reality TV and Japanese game shows with the plot of the movie The Truman Show, and you’ve got this unbelievable true story.

  MADE IN JAPAN

  In January 1998 a struggling 23-year-old stand-up comedian known only by his stage name Nasubi (Eggplant) heard about an audition for a mysterious “show business–related job” and decided to try out for it.

  The audition was the strangest one he’d ever been to. The producers of a popular Japanese TV show called Susunu! Denpa Sho-Nen (Don’t Go for It, Electric Boy!) were looking for someone who was willing to be locked away in a one-bedroom apartment for however long it took to win 1 million yen (then the equivalent
of about $10,000) worth of prizes in magazine contests.

  Cameras would be set up in the apartment, and if the contestant was able to win the prizes, the footage would be edited into a segment called “Sweepstakes Boy.” The contestant would be invited on the show to tell his story and, with any luck, the national TV exposure would give a boost to his career. That was it—that was the reward (along with the magazine prizes).

  SUCH A DEAL

  As if that wasn’t a weak enough offer, there was a catch—the contestant would have to live off the prizes he won. The apartment would be completely empty, and the contestant wouldn’t be allowed to bring anything with him—no clothes, no food, nothing. If he wanted to eat, he had to win food. If he wanted to wear clothes, he had to win those, too. Nasubi passed the audition and agreed to take the job.

  On day one of the contest, the producers blindfolded him and took him to a tiny one-bedroom apartment in an undisclosed location somewhere in Tokyo. The apartment was furnished with a magazine rack and thousands of neatly stacked postcards (for entering the contests), as well as a table, a cushion to sit on, a telephone, notepads, and some pens. Other than that, it was completely empty.

  Nasubi stripped naked and handed his clothes and other personal effects to the producers. He stepped into the apartment, the door was locked behind him, and his strange adventure began.

  HOME ALONE

  Nasubi spent his days entering magazine sweepstakes, filling out between 3,000 and 8,000 postcards a month. It took him two weeks to win his first prize—a jar of jelly. Two weeks later, he won a five-pound bag of rice.

  But how could he cook it? He hadn’t won any cooking utensils. He tried eating the rice raw, and when that failed he put some in a tin can, added some water, and put it next to a burner on the stove. Using this method, he cooked about half a cup of rice each day, and ate it using two of his pens for chopsticks. (The producers are believed to have given Nasubi some sort of food assistance, otherwise he would not have eaten anything for the first two weeks of the show. To this day it is unclear exactly how much assistance he received, but judging from the amount of weight he lost during the show, it wasn’t much.)