Only U.S. president buried in Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson.
Import: European snails
Background: In the 1870s, an aquatic snail native to Europe was introduced to the Great Lakes region. It wasn’t intentional: They probably came in the ballast of timber transport ships or stuck to packing crates.
Nature’s Revenge: In the summer of 1898, when Chicago residents turned on faucets, the soybean-size snails came out along with the water. Millions of the snails clogged the filtering screens at Chicago’s waterworks, so many that they had to be shoveled into carriages and hauled away. But that didn’t end the infestation. The snails—dubbed “faucet snails” after the Chicago invasion—have now spread to infest municipal water supplies as far away as Montana to the west and Maryland to the east.
Import: Russian hogs
Background: In 1912 a shipment of 14 wild Russian hogs, including 11 sows and 3 boars, arrived at a private game preserve in western North Carolina. The owner’s intent: to breed them for sport hunting. By the early 1920s, the preserve had about 100 hogs, and the hunt was on. The hunters managed to kill only two hogs. Most of the rest escaped into the surrounding mountains.
Nature’s Revenge: The hogs thrived and spread, including into the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They bred with local hogs, producing a hybrid that can weigh as much as 300 pounds and have tusks eight inches long. Though normally shy and reclusive, the hybrid hogs can be ferocious when confronted. According to one mountaineer, “Them tusks can rip a hound from stem to stern. What’s more, the hog knows it.”
Import: American gray squirrel
Background: In 1890 ten gray squirrels were shipped from the United States to England and released on the estate of the Duke of Bedford. Why? Just for the novelty.
Nature’s Revenge: The grey squirrel moved into Britain’s parks, gardens, and woodlands. Rather than sticking to their usual diet of nuts, the American squirrels began to strip and eat bark, killing forests of beech, sycamore, and oak trees. Over the next 100 years, the species “colonized the entire land surface of England and Wales.” Current economic cost: more than $16 million a year.
If you lined up every Harry Potter book sold, they’d circle the Earth twice.
DEATH BY LAWNMOWER
We must be pretty cynical to think it could be even mildly amusing that any particular country has the highest per capita death rate due to, say, falls from trees. And yet somehow it’s kind of compelling, isn’t it?
Emphysema and alcohol-related liver diseases: Hungary
Falls down steps, blunt-object attacks: Lithuania
Hepatitis, explosions: Malta
Asthma: South Korea
Meningitis: Nicaragua
Cholera: Belize
Kidney failure: El Salvador
Stabbings, and overall murders: Colombia
Anthrax: Paraguay
Obesity: Austria
The common cold: Egypt
Heart failure: Argentina
Executions: The Bahamas
Chicken pox: Venezuela
Teen suicides, skin cancer: New Zealand
Cancer: The Netherlands
Lightning strikes: Cuba
Lawnmower accidents, falls from trees: Moldova
Lupus, sickle-cell anemia: Bahrain
Falls from cliffs: Austria
Gun-related murders: South Africa
Single-car crashes: Lithuania
Eating disorders: Iceland
Snake and lizard bites: Panama
Epilepsy: Estonia
Multiple sclerosis: Norway
Schizophrenia: Finland
Struck by falling objects: Cayman Islands
Burning clothing: Latvia
Circulatory diseases: Ireland
Heart disease: Slovakia
Background check: Some mummies are so well preserved that their fingerprints can be taken.
FABULOUS FLOPS
Some more stories to remind you that even though an idea might look good on paper, it doesn’t always pan out in real life.
Product: The Dodge La Femme, introduced by Chrysler in 1955
What it Was: One of the first American cars designed specifically with women in mind
Details: In the mid-1950s, Chrysler executives noticed that a lot of one-car families were buying second cars, and that women had a big say in the purchase—after all, moms would be doing much of the driving of the new car. So why not make a car just for ladies? The 1955 La Femme featured a two-tone “Heather Rose and Sapphire White” paint job, rose-colored fabric seats with pink vinyl trim, and special seatback compartments that stored the La Femme rain cape, rain hat, umbrella, and shoulder bag, which was stuffed with a La Femme compact, cigarette lighter, cigarette case, and other accessories.
Flop: Women in two-car families were going to do most of the driving in the second car, but not all of it. The pink-and-white La Femmes were like giant purses on wheels—few men of that era would have been caught dead driving one, and few ever were... only about 2,500 had sold by the time Chrysler discontinued the car for the 1957 model year. Only a handful of La Femmes survive today. They’re valuable collector’s items, and so are the accessories: In 1998 a La Femme shoulder bag and rain cape sold for $17,000...without the car.
Product: The McDonald’s Arch Deluxe
What it Was: A “hamburger for adults” introduced in 1996
Details: The Arch Deluxe was marketed as a premium burger for customers who’d grown tired of Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. Its special features included a bakery-style bun made from potato flour, “Spanish” onions, “extra-fancy” ketchup, and its own “secret sauce”—mayonnaise mixed with two (two!) kinds of mustard.
First U.S. military unit to have African-American officers: the Confederate Louisiana Native Guards (1862).
Flop: Company hype aside, the burger was just a stuck-up Quarter Pounder. The ad campaign supporting it didn’t help: TV commercials showed kids complaining that the Arch Deluxe was “yucky” (McDonald’s way of saying the burger was for people with “mature tastes”). Sticker shock made things even worse: The Arch Deluxe cost twice as much as a Big Mac, prompting many customers to give it a pass. McDonald’s predicted $1 billion in sales the first year, but sales were so bad that individual franchisees yanked it from their menus without waiting for corporate headquarters to kill it. McDonald’s spent as much as $300 million on the Arch Deluxe before it finally gave up, making it the most expensive flop in fast-food history.
Product: Yesterday and Today
What it Was: A Beatles album released in the U.S. and Canada in the summer of 1966
Details: Despite the Beatles’ huge popularity, Capitol Records still insisted on reworking the Fab Four’s albums for American audiences. Yesterday and Today was just such an effort, a mishmash of tracks from the British versions of three different Beatle albums: Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver.
Flop: For the album cover art, Capitol inexplicably selected a photograph of the Beatles in white butchers coats, holding bloody cuts of meat and nude, decapitated baby dolls in their hands and on their laps. Such a photo likely would not have attracted much notice buried in a book of art photographs, but on the cover of an album it was too provocative. Capitol somehow didn’t realize this until it printed up 750,000 copies of the album, then mailed advanced copies to music critics and radio stations. When even disc jockeys complained, Capitol knew it had a problem: It withdrew all 750,000 albums from circulation and pasted new, less offensive cover art (the Beatles gathered around an open steamer trunk) over the offending image. After the cost of pasting the new cover art on all those albums was factored in, Yesterday and Today actually lost money in its initial release, quite an achievement at the height of Beatlemania.
Flip-Flop: In 2006 a rare, factory-sealed “Butcher Cover” version of Yesterday and Today sold at auction for $39,000.
AFTER THE FUNERAL
Sometimes the funeral isn’t the end it’s supposed to be�
��it’s just the beginning.
ALISTAIR COOKE (1908–2004)
Claim to Fame: Host of the PBS series Masterpiece Theater from 1971 to 1992
After the Funeral: After Cooke died from lung cancer in 2004, the 95-year-old was cremated according to his wishes, but not before modern-day medical “body snatchers” stole pieces of his leg bones and sold them for $7,000, for use as surgical bone grafts. Cooke wasn’t the only victim: The body snatching ring, run by an ex-dentist named Michael Mastromarino, worked with crooked funeral homes in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to steal bones and other tissue from more than 1,000 cadavers, many of whom, like Cooke, were diseased, making them unsuitable for transplants. It’s estimated that the stolen tissue was implanted into about 10,000 unsuspecting patients, some of whom suffered ill effects as a result. After the ring was busted in 2005, Mastromarino and other conspirators pled guilty to abusing corpses, forgery, theft, and other charges and received long prison sentences. Mastromarino is serving 25 to 58 years.
MOHANDAS K. GANDHI (1869–1948)
Claim to Fame: Led the Indian nationalist movement, which won India’s independence from the British Empire in 1947
After the Funeral: After he was assassinated in January 1948, Gandhi was cremated atop a funeral pyre. Custom dictated that his oldest son scatter the ashes into a river or into the sea within 13 days. But Gandhi’s oldest son, Harilal, was estranged from his father and the duty was never performed. Instead, Gandhi’s ashes were placed in numerous small copper urns and distributed all over India to be scattered in local rivers. Most of the ashes were scattered, but several urns’ worth were not.
• One urn sat forgotten in a bank vault in the Indian state of Orissa until it was rediscovered in 1994. After a three-year legal battle, one of Gandhi’s great-grandsons scattered the ashes at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
African bush babies have “toilet claws” on their hind feet that they use just for “grooming.”
• Another surfaced in 2007, when the son of one of Gandhi’s close friends tried to donate it to a museum in Mumbai. Those ashes were also claimed by the family, and in 2008 one of Harilal’s granddaughters scattered them in the Arabian Sea.
• A third urn is in southern California, entombed in a Gandhi memorial at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades. The owners have no plans to hand it over. No one knows how many urns were filled with Gandhi’s ashes in 1948, so there may be more urns out there, waiting to be discovered.
BENITO MUSSOLINI (1883–1945)
Claim to Fame: Founder of Italian fascism, Il Duce (“The Leader”) was the dictator of Italy from 1925 to 1943.
After the Funeral: Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were captured by Communist partisans and executed while trying to flee to Spain in the closing days of World War II. Their bodies were transported to Milan, where they were hung upside down from the roof of a gas station. After the bodies were taken down, Mussolini was autopsied (the Americans kept a sample of his brain for study), then buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Milan’s Musocco Cemetery.
A year later, a right-wing journalist named Domenico “the Body Snatcher” Leccisi located Mussolini’s grave, dug up the decaying corpse and made off with it. (Most of it, anyway: Leccisi is believed to have lost one of Il Duce’s legs and perhaps a finger or two as he made his escape.) Fascist sympathizers moved the body from one place to another in the months that followed, but in August 1946 the authorities caught up with it in a Franciscan monastery near Milan, where it was hidden in a trunk. Fearing that Mussolini’s grave might become a fascist shrine, the Italian government hid the dictator’s body in another monastery for eleven years before returning it to the Mussolini family in 1957. They placed the body, minus the brain sample and missing appendages, in the Mussolini family crypt in the town of Dovia di Predappio, Italy. (The brain sample was returned in 1966; the leg and missing fingers were never recovered.) Just as the authorities feared, the crypt has become a pilgrimage site: As many as 100,000 tourists, many of them neofascists, visit the tomb each year.
It would take about 3 years of nonstop pedaling to ride your bike to the moon.
METAL, PART II
It’s part of so many products in your life, from your car to your pen, but you probably never even think about where it comes from. Here’s part II of the story. (Part 1 is on page 236.)
LOOK! SHINY!
For at least a few million years, human beings and their ancestors used tools made from such materials as wood, bone, and rock, to help make their lives a little easier. It didn’t make their lives that much easier: Homo sapiens have been relatively primitive nomadic hunters and gatherers for almost all of their existence. Then, around 10,000 years ago they began discovering ways to work with a “new” material: metal.
The first metals used by humans were the ones that early metalsmiths didn’t have to do very much with to make them usable. These are the native metals—metals that occur in nature in a pure state, or are naturally mixed with other elements in a way that maintains their usable properties. They include copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold.
Someone might have just found nuggets of these metals in a streambed, or in the roots of an unearthed tree, and thought they were attractive. They may have pounded them with stone hammers and found that they could shape them. That could have led to metals being used in jewelry or ornaments, or to the making of metal tools and weapons like axes, knives, and swords—a vast improvement over the old stone tools. All of this eventually led to people actively searching for more metals, the establishment of mines, trading in metals between different peoples, and the birth of a metal industry. However it happened—it happened in numerous locations all over the world.
METALLURGY
Starting around 8,000 years ago, archaeologists say, people started discovering that they could alter the metal. They may have discovered it by accident, or perhaps people just got creative, or maybe it was a combination of both. In any case, new processes were developed to alter metals, then to create entirely new ones that didn’t exist in nature at all—with huge improvements in quality. Over the next few thousand years, mining and metalworking became integral to most of the cultures on Earth, and metal became one of the most civilization-changing substances in human history. Each of these new processes involved fire, and it’s likely that experimentation with one led directly to the next. The most important advancements:
Your tuition dollars at work: The University of Alabama offers an “Intro to Zombies” course.
Annealing. This is simply the process of heating metal until it’s cherry red. This restores old, brittle metal to its original malleable state, allowing it to be reworked and prolonging its usability. Annealing can be done at relatively low temperatures (copper can be annealed in a campfire). It was first done sometime around 6000 B.C., somewhere in the Middle East, and possibly in Europe and India around the same time.
Smelting. In this process, metals are melted into a liquid state, offering for much more freedom to shape them into different forms. Metals were first smelted around 5000 B.C., after the development of more advanced pottery kilns, which can produce much higher heats than could be achieved in simple open fires.
Alloy Production. This is the process of mixing different metals while they are in a molten state. It began around 3300 B.C. (the beginning of the Bronze Age), with the first production of bronze—a mixture of copper and tin that is much harder and more durable than either of its components.
Extraction. With further improvements in kiln technology and the subsequent ability to achieve higher temperatures, techniques were developed that allowed for the extraction of metals from ore. It was first done with iron in the Middle East around 1500 B.C.—marking the beginning of the Iron Age.
Smelting, alloy production, and extraction were practiced by ancient peoples in Europe, Asia, South America, and as far north as Mexico, but not in the rest of North America, or in Aust
ralia, until Europeans arrived. These simple processes remain the foundation of what is likely the largest and most successful industry in human history: the metal industry.
For Part III of “Metals,” turn to page 504.
Rocky Mountain high: Colorado has more microbreweries per capita than any other state.
AMAZING COINCIDENCES
The universe sometimes works in mysterious ways.
• What do American cartoonist Hank Ketcham and British cartoonist David Law have in common? Both—independently—came up with comic-strip characters named “Dennis the Menace,” both of whom were obnoxious youngsters. Not only that, both characters debuted on the exact same day: March 12, 1951. Neither man filed suit against the other, because both understood that it was just a strange coincidence. (But to avoid confusion, the U.S. version was shortened to “Dennis” when it ran in the U.K.)
• Two women named Patricia Ann Campbell were born on March 13, 1941. Due to an administrative goof, they were both issued the same Social Security number. Forty years later, when they were called in to the government office to rectify the mistake, they discovered that they both were bookkeepers, both had studied cosmetics, both had fathers named Robert, both had married military men a few days apart in 1959, both had two children, and their kids were the exact same ages.
• In 1992 Sue Hamilton, a British office worker, needed to call her co-worker, Jason Pegler, when the fax machine broke. She found his number on a bulletin board, dialed it, and he picked up. “Sorry to ring you at home, Jason,” she said. “I’m not at home,” he replied. “I was walking past a phone booth when it rang.” Instead of dialing Pegler’s phone number, Hamilton had accidentally dialed his employee number—which happened to be the same number as the phone booth he happened to be walking past.
Uncle John’s 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader® Page 36