by Red Green
And from a marketing perspective, it would be tough to sell something called “doesn’t take very long compared to what you’re used to pudding.” So sure, using the word instant is a bit of a white lie, but without those there’d be almost no human communication.
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Howard Boschler lived in the Possum Lake area, where for several years he had been able to survive without the benefit of gainful employment. He did it by having a keen sense of what people would buy and then selling it to them. He watched quietly while the instant food phenomenon gained traction.
On his sixtieth birthday, his friends both pitched in and bought him a small jar of sea monkeys, which made Howard realize that the “instant” approach was not restricted to food. The next spring, he went door to door selling “instant smarts.” It was a coarse powder to which you add water and drink, and presto, you were smarter. “Instant smarts” was an instant hit. The next day, one of Possum Lake’s resident intellectuals (they stand out) recognized the powder as regular table salt.
When confronted, Howard replied by asking, “Well, would you buy powder from me again?” The answer was, of course, no, to which Howard said, “Well then, you’re smarter. You’re welcome.”
Howard Boschler, Local Opportunist
INSTANT REPLAY
George Retzlaff
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George Retzlaff, a producer for the CBC on the very popular Hockey Night in Canada, was the first to come up with a wet-film replay of a hockey goal during the 1955–56 season.
The replay took about thirty seconds to be ready to show, and was the first of its kind. George got into trouble, though, as he did not warn the ad agency (MacLaren) in advance that he was planning to use the new technique, so they missed the chance to market it. Wow.
Also, the sister production studio in Montreal did not have the same equipment, and so George had broken the in-house CBC rule that production in both studios had to be on the same level. Double wow.
He did not use the method again. Can you blame him? The same brain trust that said no to George’s ingenuity said yes to my television show. Not sure how I feel about that now.
What a great message to send out to future Canadian innovators: Don’t do anything until we find a way to make money at it, and you’re not allowed to chew gum unless you brought enough for everyone. Let’s just be glad George didn’t find a cure for cancer. The drug companies would have been ticked and the health care bosses wouldn’t let him use it until every hospital had one.
And what a message to send to George. “I know you’ve just invented something that will be a boon to our industry in terms of audience appreciation and revenue generated, but it will also create a lot of political problems with our advertisers and sister stations, and that’s not what you’re here for, George. Now, just sit there and push those buttons like you were hired to do. I’ll do the thinking, thank you very much. Merci beaucoup.”
Sometimes I think any form of progress is a miracle.
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The rest of the television world took the idea and ran with it. It became an immediate staple of every televised sport. It was kind of like instant home movies. We’d all seen home movies before, but that ten-day delay while the guy at the drugstore developed them was enough to remove any desire to watch them.
The ability to see something and then to be able to immediately watch it again, while you were still sort of interested, was pretty sweet. But what happened after that is the interesting part.
The ability to look at things the way they were in the past had been around since the cavemen drew picutres of fires on their walls. Artists got better, and then we got still cameras and then we got movie cameras and then we got instant still cameras and then we got George, whose idea was really the first instant movie camera.
But it was all passive observation. You could look at what happened in the past, but you couldn’t in any way alter its outcome. Kind of like going back in a time machine but not being allowed to change anything.
But then one day, all that went out the window. It was probably the fans who made it happen. In the old days, when a ref made a bad call, the fans would get mad for an instant, throw out a couple of boos and then suck it up and get back to the action. With George’s instant replay, the fans could watch the bad call over and over and over and over again. And so could the team owners. And the refs. And the wives of the refs. Something had to give.
The refs had always been suspected of being the bad guys, but now there was proof. So one by one the sports started changing rules, using the instant replay as an opportunity for the refs to make sure they’d got it right and change their rulings if they hadn’t. And then they allowed the coaches to challenge many of the rulings during the game.
The weirdest example has to be tennis. In other sports, the instant replay involves showing the taped footage from multiple angles at slow speeds in order to get the call right. Not so in tennis. In tennis, when a player challenges a call, the instant replay is a cartoon. It’s a digital picture of a tennis ball landing on a digital court. Huh? I know you are wondering about the shot that was just made, Mr. Federer, but watch this mini-movie of a digital ball landing out, does that help? No, it doesn’t.
But thankfully, the other sports have the sense to show a real replay when called for. Now we got a true time machine. You can go back into the past and fix what was wrong. And all thanks to George. Thank you, George. I hope the CBC threw you a huge retirement party, and I hope you got a better watch than the guy in Montreal.
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I wish instant replay worked in the real world. It would be good if you could go back and change the things you did wrong. It’s really the only reason to have instant replay. Often when we’re coming home from a party, my wife will give me an instant replay of the entire evening and it really isn’t helpful to either one of us.
Video games have been around for about fifty years now, and to be honest I still don’t see the appeal. I’m sure you’re surprised by that. You would think being in a world where you can do anything you want and experience no real-life consequences would be appealing to a guy with as many injuries as I’ve had, but no. I guess I just prefer the real thing.
These games are in this new world they call “virtual reality.” Who wants virtual reality when we have actual reality? I don’t. But some do. Ever since Pong came out in the ’70s, video games have been a serious time waster. Sure, over the years the graphics have gotten better and the storylines more complicated. Some game manufacturers have enough money now that they can hire Hollywood actors to voice the in-game characters, giving fans a sense that maybe this was money well spent.
This industry has really taken off with younger people. Seems kind of sad to me that the next generation prefers an imaginary world to the real thing. I hope that’s not my fault.
And now, for a fee, you can go online and watch someone else play a video game. Live. Think about that. The guy playing the game has checked out of the actual world, which is bad enough, but the guy watching is even one step farther away than that. He doesn’t even have the confidence to step into an imaginary world.
Good luck with the real one.
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RATING: You lose, please play again. Maybe Candidate #7.
INSULIN
Frederick Banting
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Frederick Banting was born in Alliston, Ontario, on November 14, 1891. After flunking out of a general arts program at U of T, he petitioned to join the medical program, was accepted and began classes in 1913. Good to know that if you’re not good enough in school to get a B.A. in fly fishing, you can always be a doctor.
After the war broke out, his medical class was fast-tracked, so he graduated in December 1916 and went right into the army. Merry Christmas. He received a medal for heroism for continuing to aid other soldiers after being injured himself, which marked the first but not last time he would save lives.
While getting ready to deli
ver a lecture in 1920, he read the work of a few other scientists on the role of the pancreas and was anxious to begin his own testing on the subject. He approached J.J.R. Macleod at U of T, who reluctantly gave Banting some research space and the use of an assistant named Charles Best while Macleod was away for the summer.
Banting and Best’s research lead to the invention of insulin, and eventually its first use on human patients.
Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in 1923 for the invention of insulin, but Banting was cheesed off that Macleod had received the award with him instead of Best. Banting decided to share his portion of the award money with Best. He didn’t want to see Best bested because he knew Best was best.
Insulin is a great, great discovery. Thousands, maybe even millions of lives have been saved or at least extended by it. So what is it about humans that they take a miracle like insulin and immediately start imagining how similar medical breakthroughs must be right around the corner?
I say “humans,” but really what I’m talking about is “fat guys.” If science can find a way to allow a diabetic to eat candy and live, surely it can find a way for a glutton to eat twelve cheeseburgers and still stay slim. And the added misconception, which makes it doubly dangerous, is that the patient doesn’t have to make any adjustments at all. The belief is that the diabetic doesn’t have to alter his diet, or exercise regimen, because the insulin will take care of everything. Surely there’s a pill or injection coming that will juice up your metabolism or turbocharge your large intestine so that all those calories you take in won’t be hanging around long enough to do any damage.
Of course, now we’re tapping into a behavioural pattern that’s at the core of all human existence: self-delusion. “I’m fine. I’m sure I’m fine. I’m not perfect, but nobody is. There are people who are better than me, but there are also people who are worse than me. I’m good. Despite what my boss and my doctor and my wife and my mirror and my urine tests say, I’m fine.”
I know that advertisers and movie producers and the Fox News Channel believe that we all like to see young, good-looking, fit people. And we do. But not totally and not all the time. Once in a while we need to see a fat, ugly, disgusting guy. Somebody worse than us. When we look at the attractive people, we think, “Wow, I wish I looked like that.” But we know we can’t. Whereas when we look at Bluto, we think, “Wow, at least I don’t look like that.”
If you know you can’t be the best, you pride yourself on not being the worst. It’s a lot easier to be a fat guy than to be the fattest guy. Doctors are partially to blame because they lie. They tell the patient that he’s gotta lose a hundred pounds or he’ll be dead in two years. Then, on the second day of the diet, the patient meets a guy who’s a hundred pounds heavier than him and five years older. He thinks, “Wait a minute, he didn’t die. I probably won’t either…Oh look, a Dairy Queen.”
Really fat guys are like the canary in the coal mines for moderately fat guys. They’re the test pilots for obesity. They get sent out to see if the ice is thick enough for the snowmobiles, if an all-bacon diet really will kill you, and just how low are the standards of the girls in this bar.
I think if you’re a doctor or a medical scientist, you gotta be very careful. If you ever come up with a drug that guarantees health and happiness, people will just take that and go back to the couch. If that happens, humanity will be lost, nothing will ever be accomplished and, more important, this will be the last book about inventions ever written. Nobody wants that.
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In 1974, local bar entertainer Burt Franklin, inspired by the creation of insulin and its effects on helping the pancreas do its job, decided to try something similar for his ailing liver. Burt was the resident magician at Duffy’s Tavern in downtown Possum Lake. He would entertain the clientele by performing card tricks and pulling coins out of various body orifices, sometimes his own.
The reviews were mixed. As were Burt’s beverages. That’s because the bar paid Burt in drinks and he always cashed those cheques before leaving the building. As a result, Burt’s liver was in rough shape. He had a hard time getting life insurance, and the local fire department had declared that Burt was not, under any circumstances, to be cremated.
Burt Franklin, Local Entertainer Credit 41
One night after Burt had been significantly overpaid at the pub, he caught a PBS special on insulin and decided to start concocting his own medical breakthrough. He named it “cod liver ale.” It was a mix of alcoholic beverages, Advil, a mild laxative, toothpaste, windshield washer/antifreeze, four jujubes, a pomegranate and gum from under the bar.
Burt tried the formula every morning for a week. He didn’t notice any change in his health, other than one day he burped on the bus and set off the smoke alarm. By the second week, Burt saw his doctor, who performed an MRI only to discover that Burt’s liver was now the size of an adult raccoon.
The doctor ordered Burt to stop taking the homemade medicine and quit his gig at Duffy’s. He then arranged for Burt to entertain patients in the hospital waiting room, where he would be paid in organs. Over the next three months Burt received four kidneys, two spleens and a Wurlitzer before he got the liver he so desperately needed.
JOLLY JUMPER
Olivia Poole
Patent Drawing for the Jolly Jumper
Olivia Poole came up with the first Jolly Jumper in Toronto in 1910. She got the idea from her Aboriginal heritage: the papooses that First Nations people used to carry their babies around. Pretty similar to what most parents do today. It keeps the baby safe and keeps your hands free and is a great back warmer. The Jolly Jumper could just as easily have been called the Bouncing Papoose.
Olivia had the first one made for her own baby out of a cloth diaper, a steel spring and an axe handle. If you did that today, you’d be getting a visit from the Children’s Aid Society.
Olivia and her son brought the product to market in 1948, and received the patent in 1957. By then, her son was almost fifty and was probably getting a little tired of demonstrating the darn thing.
This is one of those inventions that make me nostalgic for the times when you always had a little danger mixed in with the fun. We never wore bicycle helmets. We played lawn darts. We ate peanut butter. And we had Jolly Jumpers.
They hooked onto the door trim over the kid’s head. Mind you, that was when door trim was made of wood, not polypropylene. And even if the thing did fall down, kids were allowed to sustain minor injuries back then. It was even encouraged. Helped prepare us for a world where sometimes things don’t go your way.
Kids aren’t allowed to think that way anymore. Maybe it’s better now, I don’t know. But I don’t regret having a BB gun or tobogganing in a cardboard box or perfecting the Jolly Jumper spin move that allowed me to see into two different rooms at the same time. It was better than the TV, which only had one channel.
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In 1958, local hardware store owner George Roloff was looking for help dealing with Heinrik, his very rambunctious one-year-old. George searched the shelves of his store, silently wishing he’d bought a pharmacy, when he spotted the Jolly Jumper.
George recognized the potential, but also knew his son would soon tire of jumping up and down in one spot. He went over to the household section and picked up a hundred feet of clothesline and a half-dozen pulleys. He then went home and mounted the clothesline and pulleys to hang horizontally from the ceiling, not unlike streetcar cables, creating a small indoor track.
George Roloff Credit 42
He hung the Jolly Jumper from a really strong clothes peg, and Heinrik was able to jump all around the house without bumping into walls or ornaments. When George’s wife came home, he was drinking beer on the porch.
She was about to ask where Heinrik was when she saw him bounce by the living room window. She didn’t take it well. George tried to explain the brilliance of the clothesline amusement ride, but in the end, she hung him out to dry.
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Loc
al adventurer Eunice Fairchild saw a lot more potential in the Jolly Jumper than just a way to keep small children occupied—something that did not concern her anyway, as she did not have children and indeed had never been married. Or had a boyfriend. Or been on a date.
Her first step was to increase the size and strength of the harness and elasticized straps. She used the bodice from a parachute that had been handed to her as she was pushed out of a plane while vacationing.
She also had a supply of truck inner tubes that she was planning to use to make figure-enhancing casual wear, but decided instead to cut the rubber into long strips and tie them together to give her the combination of strength and stretchiness that a lot of women go for.
Another drawback that Eunice noticed about the Jolly Jumper was that you were stuck in one place. She decided not only to create an adult-sized jumper, but to add technology that would allow it to be an effective means of transportation that appealed to people who were either on a tight budget or who were working to cut down on their carbon footprint.
Eunice Fairchild, Experimental Person
One day as Ms. Fairchild was riding through town on her Schwinn, wondering why the world was so weird and not really paying attention to where she was going, she ran into a window washer’s stepladder. She met the window washer a few seconds later.
She meant to apologize, but when she saw the stepladder tangled up with her bike, she knew it was the breakthrough she was looking for. She rushed home and worked all night putting it together. After sleeping most of the next two days, she awoke, took the thing apart and put it back together properly.