Now I Know More
Page 3
Schauss named the color Baker-Miller Pink, after the directors of the naval correctional institute who agreed to test his theory. Others have called it “Drunk Tank Pink” after the colloquial name for small jail cells, and it’s not uncommon to see jails and prisons with pink walls for these purposes. But one other place has given it a different name—and a different use. If you go to the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, you’ll find the walls, lockers, and even the urinals of the visiting football team’s locker room painted Baker-Miller Pink, an explicit attempt to make the opposing team less aggressive when they take to the football field.
BONUS FACT
In 2010, the use of pink resulted in a lawsuit against a prison in South Carolina. But it wasn’t the walls that were colored pink—it was the uniforms of those who, while in prison, engaged in some sort of sexual misconduct. The prison wanted to use this tactic as a punishment, embarrassing inmates in front of their peers, but the lawsuit against the prison claimed that the pink uniforms made the inmates the target of assaults.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAGENTA
WHY YOU CAN’T SEE PINK (EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN)
Roy G. Biv.
That’s not a person. It’s a mnemonic device for remembering the colors in the visible spectrum of light, or in another sense, the colors of rainbows. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. In between each of these colors is almost every other color we can detect . . . “almost” being the operative word.
The exception? Magenta. Go find a picture of a rainbow and you’ll notice that magenta (often called pink), just isn’t there. But, color-blindness aside, we can clearly see it. What’s going on here?
First, let’s talk about rainbows. Light comes in all sorts of wavelengths, and we humans can detect light in many of those wavelengths. (We can’t see all of them—infrared and ultraviolet are two of the more commonly known invisible ones, but radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays are also examples.) The light itself doesn’t actually have a color—as Isaac Newton observed, “The rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color.” Our brains just associate different wavelengths with different colors. The range of 380 nanometers to about 450 nanometers are seen as various shades of violet, for example. Magenta, though, doesn’t have an associated wavelength.
Instead, our brain just kind of makes it up when other information comes in.
Our eyes have photoreceptor cells called rods and cones. Rods detect the presence and amount of light, even if there are only small amounts, but cannot help us determine the color of things. Cones, which require more light before they turn on, help us figure out the colors. (That’s why when it’s dark, we often can’t tell what color things are.) Humans typically have three types of cones: red, blue, and green. Everything the cones detect, therefore, is actually just one of those three colors, and our brains fill in the gaps so we can “see” the other colors of the rainbow. When a yellow wavelength comes in, for example, the red and green cones are triggered. Our brains interpret that as “yellow,” and bananas, school buses, and lemons are better off for it. This makes sense . . . just ask Roy G. Biv. If you look between red and green, you’ll see yellow is situated right in there.
Magenta occurs when the red and blue cones are stimulated. That’s a problem if you look at the rainbow, because there’s no “between” red and blue, as the ends of the spectrum don’t connect with each other. The brain needs to do something with that information, and magenta seems like a pretty good solution, although for no obvious reason. After all, as Scientific American said (echoing Newton’s observation), color “is all in your head [. . .]. It is a sensation that arises in your brain.” If we’re going to make up the colors anyway, there’s no reason to limit ourselves to the stuff found in the visible spectrum—and the result is pink.
BONUS FACT
As noted earlier, when our eyes detect yellow wavelengths, that light is captured by the red and green cones and translated into what we think of as yellow. Most computer monitors (and TV and smartphone screens, for that matter) take advantage of this conversion process and skip the first step—there’s no yellow wavelengths being used whatsoever. (That’s also true for cyan, brown, and of course, magenta.) All the colors the monitors show are actually just a mix of red, blue, and green light. If you could magnify your screen a lot, you’d see a series of red, blue, and green dots, and that’s it—there are only three colors there.
THE CRAYON MAN’S SECRET
THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND THE MAN OF MANY COLORS
In 1903, the husband and wife team of Edwin and Alice Binney created the first wax crayon. Mr. Binney and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, owned a colorant company called the Binney and Smith Company, which, on July 10 of that year, introduced the couple’s new product—Crayola crayons. In the century-plus since, the company (now officially the Crayola company) has introduced more than 400 different colors of crayons, of which 133 are considered “standard” colors available in their pack of 120. (Crayola has retired thirteen colors over the years, including Blue Gray in 1990 and Thistle in 2000.) In recent years, Crayola produces 3 billion crayons each year, and over its history it has produced well over 100 billion crayons.
Emerson Moser was one of the people responsible for many of those crayons. He was a Crayola employee working as a crayon molder—a person who pours the molten wax into the molds, shaping it into the recognizable (and useful) crayon shapes as it dries. For more than thirty years, day in and day out, Moser made crayons. Roughly 100 times a day, he’d pour wax into molds designed for 2,400 crayons. Over the course of his career, he molded an estimated 1.4 billion crayons. Periwinkle or Peach, Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber, it didn’t matter the color.
That last part—that the color didn’t matter—that’s pretty important. Because when he retired, Emerson Moser admitted he was colorblind.
The infirmity was, of course, something you’d normally not want from a man whose job it was to make one of ten dozen different colors. However, Moser’s colorblindness, he’d later explain to the Associated Press, was slight; his biggest problem was determining the difference between similar shades of blues and greens. (That’s probably not all that strange—can many of us really tell the difference between Aquamarine and Turquoise Blue, or between Jungle Green and Fern, for example?) He told reporters that he found out he was colorblind in 1953, when a doctor discovered the issue during a routine physical exam, but “it was so slight that if the doctor wouldn’t have tested me, I probably would have never noticed it.”
His job didn’t involve making sure that the right labels were on the right crayons, anyway—the crayons, after hardening in the molds, went to another area for that part of the manufacturing process. That being the case, the company was okay with the odd little fact that their most senior crayon molder wasn’t able to differentiate between all 120 colors. Besides, Moser was a top employee: as of his retirement in 1990, Moser’s record of 1.4 billion crayons molded stood above anyone else in the company.
BONUS FACT
In 1962, Crayola introduced Peach as one of the colors in its forty-eight-pack. It wasn’t a new color, though. The color was originally introduced in 1949 under the name “Flesh,” even though not all children have peach-colored skin tones.
DOUBLE BONUS
On February 6, 1996, Crayola molded its 100 billionth crayon, officially speaking. (It’s an estimate—there’s no reason to believe that Crayola kept an accurate count.) To celebrate, the company had a special molder come in to make the historic crayon. Not Emerson Moser, though—that honor went to Fred Rogers, better known from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
INVISIBLE PINK
THE UNLIKELY COLOR OF CAMOUFLAGE
The Supermarine Spitfire was a small aircraft used by the British Royal Air Force in World War II for recon purposes, flying at low altitudes. Typically, Spitfires came with dark colors such as green on top.
If an enemy plane were to pass overhead, the green-painted Spitfire would blend in with the terrain below.
But not all of them were green. Some were painted pink.
World War II took place well before the era of spy satellites, drones, and other technological advances that make overhead intel much easier to gather. For the British to know what the Germans were up to, they needed to fly overhead and, literally, take pictures. Many in the Royal Air Force (RAF) were tasked with photo reconnaissance missions, and the Spitfire—a small, one-man fighter—was one of the few planes able to penetrate (or evade) the Germans’ outer defenses. But getting past the perimeter was only the first step toward the ultimate goal. The Spitfire still needed to fly over the targeted areas, take its pictures, and return safely. That required evading detection for much longer, ideally for the entire mission.
The RAF allowed photo recon units to experiment a bit with how to get that part done, especially when it came to painting the planes. Over the course of the war, the Spitfires were outfitted in all sorts of colors. Green made sense when in aerial combat while pink obviously did not—against the green backdrop of the ground or ocean below, the Spitfires would be nearly instantly noticed. But when on recon missions, the backdrops were the skies.
So the theory the RAF employed? Paint the planes pink and use the sunsets, sunrises, and most importantly, the clouds as your allies.
As the website http://io9.com explained, the cloud layer proved to be excellent cover for these planes. The Spitfires would run their missions at a relatively low altitude, hanging as close to the bottom of the clouds as possible. Enemy planes would have trouble seeing them through or against clouds, as would forces on the ground. The pink planes, which stood out on the ground, were much harder to detect when in the air—which is where they were performing their mission.
Very little is known about these planes—the number painted pink, how frequently they were used, etc. (Given that they were on spy missions, that seems reasonable.) We do know they had a meaningful impact in the outcome of World War II. Many of the photos of pink Spitfires show them decorated with black-and-white stripes on the rear part of the plane. Those stripes were added after D-Day, signifying that the plane was used in support of the successful invasion.
BONUS FACT
Planes weren’t the only things turned “invisible pink” during the war. The Supreme Allied Commander South East Command, Louis Mountbatten, noticed that a ship still in pre-war lavender appeared to vanish against the horizon at dawn and dusk. Believing that this would give the Royal Navy an advantage, Mountbatten ordered that several ships be painted in a dark pink approaching grey, now called Mountbatten Pink. Other naval officers had their ships painted that color, starting a trend. Whether the color provided any actual camouflage value is unknown—it was never tested in any scientific manner.
TRIPLE PLAY
THE WORLD WAR II BASEBALL GAME WITH TWO LOSERS
Collectively, Baseball Hall of Fame managers Joe McCarthy and Leo Durocher were at the helms of their respective teams for forty-eight seasons, winning well over 4,000 games. Their managerial careers overlapped in the late 1930s and through the 1940s. At times they were cross-town rivals—from 1939 until 1946, McCarthy managed the New York Yankees while Durocher was the skipper for the still-in-Brooklyn Dodgers. Even though there was no interleague play back then, at least twice, the two commanded their teams from the same ballpark. Many baseball fans know about one of them, as McCarthy’s Yankees beat Durocher’s Dodgers in the 1941 World Series. The other one, though, was a special case. Not only were the Yankees and Dodgers in the same stadium, but they were in the same dugout.
That’s because they were both the visiting team. The game was held neither at Yankee Stadium nor at the Dodgers’ home turf of Ebbets Field. The teams were at the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants. The Giants themselves were there too. They were in the home dugout, and all three teams were playing against each other in one of the strangest games in baseball history.
The date was June 26, 1944. That might seem like a perfectly normal day for a perfectly normal baseball game, but the year changed things. The United States and much of the Western world was caught in the throes of World War II. War is expensive, and just about everyone was doing what they could to support the war effort. New York’s sportswriters were no exception. As a scholar writing for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) discovered, a group of sportswriters had an idea for a “three-sided” game—one that’s never happened since.
The rules were simple: It was a nine-inning baseball game, but instead of teams alternating their time in the field or at bat, they rotated. In the top of the first, the Dodgers came to bat against the Yankees, and in the bottom of the first, the teams switched sides. Then the Dodgers came back up to the plate for the top of the second. So far, normal. But the team pitching to them now wasn’t the Yankees. It was the Giants. The two NL rivals faced off for that inning, and in the third, the Dodgers took a breather in the shared away-team dugout while the Yankees and Giants faced off. This pattern repeated twice over the next six innings.
The Dodgers won the game, with five runs to the Yankees’ one and the Giants’ zero. But the real winner of this exhibition was the War Bonds effort—the more than 50,000 people attending the three-way contest purchased an estimated $6.5 million of them during the course of the game.
BONUS FACT
An unassisted triple play occurs when all three outs in an inning are recorded in one play by the same fielder. It’s one of the rarest events in baseball. As of the 2013 Major League Baseball season, there have been only fifteen unassisted triple plays in the league’s history. That’s rarer than a pitcher throwing a perfect game (twenty-one times since 1900) or a batter slugging four home runs in a game (sixteen times).
CHECKMATE
WHAT NOT TO DO WITH A CHECK FOR A MILLION DOLLARS
In the baseball world, a team’s leadoff hitter has a specific role: get on base and, ultimately, get into a position to score a run. If you ask a baseball fan who is the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, he or she will almost certainly say, “Rickey Henderson.” Henderson, the career leader in both runs scored and stolen bases, was well known for wreaking havoc on pitchers while he was on the base paths.
He also managed to wreak havoc on the Oakland Athletics’ finance department.
Henderson made his Major League debut as a member of the A’s (as the Athletics have become known) midway through the 1979 season. For the next ten years, he’d play for both the A’s and Yankees and was easily the league’s biggest base-stealing threat—he led the league in the category in nine of the ten seasons.
Before the 1990 season, Henderson became a free agent for the first time. While the “Man of Steal” had already earned more than $10 million over his career to that point, Rickey (as he’d refer to himself) was about to get a much larger payday from the A’s—a four-year contract guaranteeing roughly $12 million in salary. Of that $12 million, $1 million was due up front in the form of a signing bonus. The A’s paid him by check.
The novelty of a million-dollar check was not lost on Henderson.
After the 1990 season, the A’s finance department tried to balance the books, only to find a $1 million overage—they had too much money in the bank, given what they thought they had paid out. An inquest showed the likely culprit: for some reason, the million-dollar check made out to Henderson had never cleared. The A’s called up Rickey and asked if he knew what had happened, and luckily for the finance people, he did.
Henderson never cashed the check. Instead, he had it framed and hung it on one of his walls. The check, as Henderson would later explain, was a constant reminder that he had made it—that he was a millionaire—and he wanted it to be in a place where he’d see it every day.
The A’s asked him to make a copy of the check, frame that copy, and deposit the actual one. Henderson, fortunately, agreed.
BONUS FACT
There are
a lot of really great Henderson stories on the Internet, with varying degrees of truth. For example, despite what some websites say, he never asked a teammate how long it takes to drive to the island nation of the Dominican Republic. But Rickey did once fall asleep on an ice pack, getting frostbite in the process—a malady that made him miss some playing time due to injury.
DOUBLE BONUS
The term “checkmate” comes from the Persian shah mat, which means “the king is helpless.”
MAKE YOUR OWN REBATES
HOW A SELF-DESCRIBED POOR PERSON GOT CASH BACK
Gary lives at 15615 North 35th Avenue #114 in Phoenix, Arizona. He is very poor. He probably doesn’t mind that we’re publishing that information, because he gives it out freely. Or, more accurately, he gives it money-ly, if that’s a word. (It’s not.) Gary writes his address on dollar bills before he spends them. If you end up with one of them, he asks that you mail it back to him.
And it works.
A CBS affiliate in Gary’s area tracked him down (not that it was very difficult) to ask him what’s going on here. It turns out that Gary is a sixty-something, legally blind retiree. In 2003, he had to take some unpaid leave from his job due to some health issues. That’s when he got the idea of asking people to return his money to him. He used a red pen to get the message across. Each dollar bill that passes through his wallet—and he only does this with one- dollar bills—is adorned with a message reading “Please return this bill to me” written at the top, with his address written in the center area around where the word “One” is printed on the bill, and with “I am very poor” at the bottom.