by Lewis, Dan
As a consequence of this, it’s very easy for a third party to start making maps—the mapmaker simply has to copy the data from any other reliable map and reproduce it. To some degree, copyright law should prevent this, but outright copying isn’t so easy to prove. As a solution, some mapmakers add fake streets (called “trap streets”) or even fake towns (often called “paper towns”) into their maps. Any third party copying their work will also copy the fictional creation unique to the original mapmaker’s product.
According to novelist and YouTube celeb John Green in a TEDx talk, the General Drafting Company in 1937 did just this with the town of Agloe, creating it out of thin air at the intersection of two dirt roads just a few miles from Roscoe. (Green later used Agloe as one of the locations for his novel, Paper Towns, and as the inspiration for its title.) A few decades later, Agloe appeared again, but this time in a map made by a different, unrelated company—Rand McNally. General Drafting thought they had caught Rand McNally red-handed, but Rand McNally had a good and surprising defense:
The county clerk’s office had given them the information.
It turns out that, in the early part of the 1950s, someone armed with the General Drafting map went to visit Agloe. Seeing nothing there, he figured that opportunity had knocked. This lost-to-history fellow probably guessed that others would also come to Agloe—it was on the map, after all!—and would expect to find something there. So he opened a small shop and called it the Agloe General Store. Over the next forty years, the fictional town of Agloe grew. As Green notes, at its largest, Agloe had a gas station, the general store, and two houses. Most importantly, Agloe had the attention of the county administrators. They considered Agloe a real place, and therefore, so did Rand McNally’s team of cartographers.
Today, sadly, Agloe is gone. The buildings are abandoned if not destroyed, and the mapmakers of the world no longer recognize its existence.
BONUS FACT
Orbiting the Earth right now is a satellite called LAGEOS 1, which contains a plaque designed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. The plaque is effectively a map, showing what the arrangement of the continents looked like when the satellite was placed into orbit. Why include this? LAGEOS 1 is expected to return to Earth in about 8 million years (due to orbital decay), and when it does, the map will tell whomever or whatever discovers it the epoch from which it came.
A PERFECTLY CROMULENT WORD
THE VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF TWO WORDS THAT AREN’T
“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,” said Jebediah Springfield, the namesake and founder of the hometown of Homer and Marge Simpson’s family. The word “embiggen,” of course, isn’t a word at all, despite the assertion of schoolteacher Miss Hoover that it is a “perfectly cromulent word.” (It shouldn’t surprise anyone that “cromulent” is, also, a made-up nonword.) One can say that Mr. Springfield’s esquivalience in formulating a motto for his town via a well-known speech was disappointing. After all, one would think that Jebediah’s investment in the region and in his own legacy would have compelled him to invest the time needed to craft a message involving, you know, actual words. But it wasn’t to be. The dord of fake words attributed to him is, therefore, incredibly high.
And yes, “esquivalience” is made up, too. Same with “dord.” You can find both in a dictionary, though, if you look hard enough—but for two very different reasons.
First came “dord,” courtesy of the G. and C. Merriam Company (a predecessor of Merriam-Webster). “Dord” first appeared in its 1934 edition of the New International Dictionary as a noun from the disciplines of physics and chemistry, meaning “density.” The error was due to odd typesetting at the time. The entry was supposed to be “D or d”—that is, a capital or lowercase letter D—the dictionary noting that either could be used, in physics or chemistry, as an abbreviation for “density.” But the entry was set as “D o r d,” and a later editor removed what appeared to be three unnecessary spaces.
“Dord” remained in subsequent editions through 1939, when a proofreader realized that the word lacked an etymology and called its veracity into question. Other dictionaries used the word until 1947, likely having copied from old dictionaries (including, perhaps, those of competitors). This may have inspired the creation of “esquivalience.”
“Esquivalience” was first spotted in the 2001 edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), a noun meaning “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities; the shirking of duty.” It was crafted by an editor named Christine Lindberg, according to the New Yorker, and was included for the sole purpose of catching those who copied the NOAD team’s work. This was more than a matter of pride—if the word appeared in another publication, NOAD immediately had evidence that the second dictionary had violated NOAD’s copyright.
Which is exactly what happened. The “word” appeared on Dictionary.com, which attributed it to Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary, but it was removed from both after the ruse was revealed. The Oxford team didn’t pursue any legal action against either company.
BONUS FACT
The Simpsons debuted in 1989; with that debut came the repeated utterance of Homer’s catchphrase, “D’oh!,” another fabricated word. However, unlike “embiggen” and “cromulent,” this one has slowly crept into common parlance. The Oxford English Dictionary’s editors recognized this in 2001, adding “d’oh” to their dictionary. It means, “Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish.”
THE CHART TOPPER
THE BESTSELLING BOOK THAT YOU COULDN’T BUY
Bestseller lists are self-explanatory: Books make the list when lots of people buy them. Sell enough, you make the list. Pretty straightforward stuff. There are wrinkles, of course. For example, a book will often crack the bestseller list even before it hits shelves, as presales vault the tome into notoriety. That’s what happened in 1956, when the book I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing made the New York Times bestseller list before publication. It was a coup for Mr. Ewing, who not only had never written a book before but also didn’t exist.
For that matter, neither did the book.
The credit—or perhaps, blame—goes to a late-night radio host named Jean Shepherd. Shepherd is probably best known for his story collection In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which was later adapted into the movie A Christmas Story (which Shepherd himself narrated). In this case, he wanted to pull a prank, one designed to show how silly bestseller lists were.
He asked his listeners to go into bookstores across the country and order the aforementioned book by Mr. Ewing, and he provided his listeners with a loosely established plot outline in case bookstore clerks were looking for more information. The prank was intended to simply confuse a bookseller or two. Shepherd believed the stores would inform the customers that no such title existed; that’s what happened to him when he tried to buy a book of old radio scripts that, apparently, had never been printed.
But that’s not what happened. The book—the nonexistent book—took on a life of its own. Even though it didn’t exist, book clubs and book reviewers were talking about it, according to listeners who called in to Shepherd’s radio show. In a later interview about the hoax, Shepherd noted that a church in Boston had added the book to the proscribed list, banning parishioners from reading it. The attention around the book was so great that many retailers asked their book buyers about the title and in doing so, caught the eye of industry experts. This surge in popularity earned the title the notice of the bestseller lists, and, perhaps more importantly, of Ian Ballantine, publisher of Ballantine Books. Ballantine tracked down the mysterious origins of the title and contacted Shepherd.
Ballantine, Shepherd, and novelist Thomas Sturgeon met for lunch and discussed making Shepherd’s joke into a real book. A few months later, I, Libertine—a 151-page novel in both paperback and hardcover—hit bookstores across the country. The Wall Street Journal ran a front-
page article about the hoax, so there was little risk of any readers being bamboozled, and in any event, the proceeds of the book went to charity.
BONUS FACT
The house where A Christmas Story was filmed is now a museum, open to the public year-round. (It’s in Cleveland, if you’re inclined to visit.) The movie notably features a lamp that looks like a woman’s leg clad in a fishnet stocking. According to the museum’s website, the lamp was custom-made for the movie, and only three were produced. All three were destroyed during movie production.
THE VERY BAD EGG
THE MISSING CHILD FROM CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
In 1964, Roald Dahl published his third book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Seven years later, in 1971, it was made into a hit movie, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder. The story is that of a poor child, Charlie Bucket, who lucks into a golden ticket, one that entitles him (and his Grandpa Joe) entry into Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory. Four other children also find golden tickets and join Charlie on the tour.
One by one, each child (other than Charlie) suffers an odd fate. The obese Augustus Gloop, unable to control his love of chocolate, falls into a river of chocolate and is sucked into a pipe—to be made into fudge. Another, compulsive gum chewer Violet Beauregarde, turns into an ever-expanding human blueberry, filling with blueberry juice. A third, the bratty Veruca Salt, is judged a “bad nut” (in the movie, the nuts are changed to eggs) and sent off to the furnace. The fourth, television addict (and aptly named) Mike Teavee, shrinks himself in a television transportation device. Only Charlie avoids a horrific accident. And all the children but Charlie are, on their way out of the factory, serenaded. Wonka’s servants, the green-haired, orange-faced Oompa-Loompas, gleefully marked the occasion of each child’s fall from grace with a song and dance.
Miranda Piker—the straight-laced daughter of a school headmaster—was child number six. Her story did not make the final version of the book. In Dahl’s original draft, Wonka develops a candy that makes the child break out in spots—a fake illness designed to get the child out of a day of school. Piker objects and she and her schoolmaster father storm the room in which the candy is being made. Something explodes, and Piker and her father, by Wonka’s scheme, are turned into a necessary part of the recipe: “We’ve got to use one or two schoolmasters occasionally or it wouldn’t work,” he says.
Piker’s story was cut, since the book publishers believed it to be too gruesome for young audiences. But a few years ago, the Times (UK) obtained and printed the excerpt, complete with the Oompa-Loompas’ song, which can be found on the Times website as of May 2014.
BONUS FACT
The actor who played Charlie in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is named Peter Ostrum. It was his only movie. He was offered the opportunity to reprise the role in two sequels but turned it down, saying that acting was more difficult than it was glamorous. (As it turned out, there’d be no second or third movies anyway; Dahl hated the first movie so much, he refused to allow the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, to be adapted for the screen, and he died before writing the third part in the series.) Later in life, Ostrum became a large-animal veterinarian, a profession he still practices today.
WORTHY OF GRYFFINDOR
HOW TO BECOME FRIENDS WITH HARRY POTTER
By the time Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in the Harry Potter saga, was published in 2000, the series had already become a smashing success. The first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (“Sorcerer’s Stone” in the United States) debuted in the UK in the summer of 1997 and was being turned into a movie; the Goblet of Fire book set a new record for Amazon.com pre-orders. Its popularity rampant, Potter’s trials and tribulations won fans of all kinds. Among them was Natalie McDonald of Toronto, a nine-year-old girl who could not wait to hear how the story would end—but sadly, not because she was impatient. McDonald had a terminal case of leukemia and was all but certain to die before Goblet hit the bookstores.
A family friend, Annie Kidder, went to the publisher of the Potter series, asking them to pass a letter (and fax) on to J.K. Rowling, author of the books. Kidder’s request was a simple one: give this dying child a preview of the outcome of Goblet—nearly a year before the rest of the world would be able to read it—as the Potter stories “had been [Natalie’s] respite from the hell of leukemia” and Natalie was not going to survive long enough to otherwise enjoy the story. Rowling was on vacation when the request arrived and replied via e-mail to Natalie’s mother on August 4, 1999. The e-mail detailed the fate of the main characters in Goblet of Fire and did so eleven months prior to the book’s publication date. Unfortunately, Natalie passed away the day prior to receiving the news.
Nevertheless, Natalie’s mother Valerie and Rowling began a friendship from that day forward. Rowling, for her part, honored Natalie’s memory in print—on page 159 (or 180, depending on the version) of Goblet of Fire, a young witch by the name of Natalie McDonald, new to Hogwarts, dons the Sorting Hat and becomes a member of House Gryffindor.
BONUS FACT
Perhaps Rowling was paying the favor forward. She completed the manuscript for Philosopher’s Stone in 1995 but two years and twelve rejection letters later had failed to find a publisher. In 1997, a small UK publishing house decided to take a chance on the then-unknown author when Alice Newton read the first chapter and demanded that the company publish the manuscript so that she would be able to read the rest of the story. Who was Alice Newton? The eight-year-old daughter of the company’s chairman.
BLUE MAN GROUP
WHY CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS GLOWED IN THE DARK
Photorhabdus luminescens sounds like a spell from the Harry Potter universe, maybe one that lights up a camera or ignites whatever mythical creature a “habdus” might be. In fact, the wizards and witches of Hogwarts aside, Photorhabdus luminescens was once the cause of what many likely considered magic. Just ask Confederate soldiers during the U.S. Civil War—especially the ones who inexplicably began to glow in the dark.
In April 1862, Union and Confederate forces met at Shiloh, Tennessee. The Battle of Shiloh was a clear Northern victory despite a heavy casualty count on both sides—each had roughly 1,700 soldiers dead and another 8,000 wounded. The Confederate medical crews were ill-prepared for those types of casualties, and many wounded Southerners were, therefore, left untreated for a few days. When night came, the wounds of some of the injured soldiers, still left unattended, began emanating a faint blue light. They created a soft glow in the otherwise-dark battlefield. When the wounded soldiers finally received treatment, many claimed that those who had the glowing injuries healed more thoroughly than those without the apparently supernatural halo.
It wasn’t a gift from the heavens, of course. It came from Photorhabdus luminescens, a type of bacteria. P. luminescens, as the cool kids call it, is a bioluminescent microbe that has a symbiotic relationship with roundworms, a parasitic nematode that infects insects. The roundworm invades an insect and, effectively, throws up a gut full of P. luminescens. The bacteria releases a toxin that kills the insect within forty-eight hours and an enzyme that breaks down the insect’s body. The nematode then eats the liquefied insect, returning much of the bacteria to its home inside the roundworm’s body.
The roundworms—and therefore the bacteria—were most likely present in the mud and dirt of the Shiloh battlefield. It’s further likely that the microbes made their way into the wounds of many of the injured Confederate soldiers and, because of other conditions, were able to thrive there. Even that required a bit of luck, which explains why only some of the soldiers began to glow.
While P. luminescens typically can’t survive in a human host because our body temperature is too warm for them, according to MentalFloss.com, prolonged exposure to the rainy and wet conditions of the battlefield caused many soldiers to suffer from hypothermia. This dropped the body temperature of those fighters, allowing P. luminescens to invade th
eir wounds—and, being a bioluminescent creature with a blueish hue, to create the glow.
The good news for those soldiers is that P. luminescens isn’t all that infectious, and our bodies’ immune systems can typically handle the microbe. But before that happens, the P. luminescens do their human hosts a favor typically reserved for the roundworms. The toxins they produce that kill insects also happen to kill other bacteria in the area, keeping the P. luminescens and its host safe from infection. That’s almost certainly what happened in this case, which is why the glowing soldiers recovered more quickly than their standard-hued comrades-at-arms.
BONUS FACT
The gene of P. luminescens associated with the insect-killing toxin was discovered by a team of British researchers in 2002. They named the gene “mcf”—short for “make caterpillars floppy,” because that’s what the toxin does.
MISTER BEER BELLY
HOW TO ACCIDENTALLY BREW BEER WHEREVER YOU ARE
The human body contains roughly 10 trillion cells—and roughly 100 trillion bacteria. These bacteria—life forms in their own right—constitute as much as 2 percent of our body mass. Most of the bacteria operate, effectively, independent of us, having little to no effect on our health or well-being. Some are actually symbiotic, aiding in the digestion of food and perhaps even making us smarter (although that study is controversial). Others are harmful—one type may make depression symptoms worse—while others cause illnesses such as strep throat.