After the Funeral: In 1995, Taylor’s heirs consented to an exhumation to settle the controversy once and for all. Result: The tests were negative. “President Taylor had in his remains only minuscule levels of arsenic—consistent with any person who lived in the 19th century,” forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples writes in Dead Men Do Tell Tales. “The possibility that another poison was used to kill Taylor is extremely remote….On the face of this evidence, the verdict of history must be that Zachary Taylor died of natural causes.”
How long will a person wait for an elevator without fidgeting? Researchers say about 40 seconds.
WILDE ABOUT OSCAR
Wit and wisdom from Oscar Wilde, one of the most popular—and controversial—writers of the 19th century.
“When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.”
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do the day after.”
“I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability.”
“As long as woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly happy.”
“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
“I like men who have a future, and women with a past.”
“Women give to men the very gold of their lives, but they invariably want it back in small change.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“The Americans are certainly great hero-worshipers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”
“No great artist sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.”
“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.”
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone’s feelings unintentionally.”
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
“The basis of action is lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”
The most costumes ever used for one film was 32,000—for Quo Vadis in 1951.
FART FACTS
You won’t find trivia like this in any ordinary book.
THE NAME
The word fart comes from the Old English term foertan to explode. Foertan is also the origin of the word petard, an early type of bomb. Petard, in turn, is the origin of a more obscure term for fart—ped, or pet, which was once used by military men. (In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, there’s a character whose name means fart—Peto.)
WHY DO YOU FART?
Flatulence has many causes—for example, swallowing air as you eat and lactose intolerance. (Lactose is a sugar molecule in milk, and many people lack the enzyme needed to digest it.) But the most common cause is food that ferments in the gastrointestinal tract.
• A simple explanation: The fats, proteins, and carbohydrates you eat become a “gastric soup” in your stomach. This soup then passes into the small intestine, where much of it is absorbed through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream to feed the body.
• But the small intestine can’t absorb everything, especially complex carbohydrates. Some complex carbohydrates—the ones made up of several sugar molecules (beans, some milk products, fiber, etc.) can’t be broken down. So they’re simply passed along to the colon, where bacteria living in your intestine feed off the fermenting brew. If that sounds gross, try this: the bacteria then excrete gases into your colon. Farting is how your colon rids itself of the pressure the gas creates.
FRUIT OF THE VINE
So why not just quit eating complex carbohydrates?
• First, complex carbohydrates—which include fruit, vegetables, and whole grains—are crucial for a healthy diet. “Put it this way,” explains Jeff Rank, an associate professor of gastroenterology at the University of Minnesota. “Cabbage and beans are bad for gas, but they are good for you.”
Record for most costume changes by an actor in one film: 65, by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963).
• Second, they’re not the culprits when it comes to the least desirable aspect of farting: smell.
• Farts are about 99% odorless gases—hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and methane (it’s the methane that makes farts flammable). So why the odor? Blame it on those millions of bacteria living in your colon. Their waste gases usually contain sulfur molecules—which smell like rotten eggs. This is the remaining 1% that clears rooms in a hurry.
AM I NORMAL?
• Johnson & Johnson, which produces drugs for gas and indigestion, once conducted a survey and found that almost one-third of Americans believe they have a flatulence problem.
• However, according to Terry Bolin and Rosemary Stanton, authors of Wind Breaks: Coming to Terms with Flatulence, doctors say most flatulence is healthy. What’s unhealthy is worrying about it so much.
NOTABLE FARTERS
• Le Petomane, a 19th-century music hall performer, had the singular ability to control his farts. He could play tunes, as well as imitate animal and machinery sounds rectally. Le Petomane’s popularity briefly rivalled that of Sarah Bernhardt.
• A computer factory in England, built on the site of a 19th-century chapel, is reportedly inhabited by a farting ghost. Workers think it might be the embarrassed spirit of a girl who farted while singing in church. “On several occasions,” said an employee, “there has been a faint girlish voice singing faint hymns, followed by a loud raspberry sound and then a deathly hush.”
• Joseph Stalin was afraid of farting in public. He kept glasses and a water pitcher on his desk so that if he felt a wind coming on, he could mask the sound by clinking the glasses while pouring water.
• Martin Luther believed, “on the basis of personal experience, that farts could scare off Satan himself.”
Shirley Temple won an honorary Oscar in 1934, when she was only 5 years old.
BATHROOM BEGINNINGS
A few interesting odds and ends from under the sink and in the medicine cabinet.
AUTOMATIC TOILET BOWL CLEANER. A guy named Eisen cleaned the toilets in his house because his wife wouldn’t—but he hated it. One day in 1977, while hanging out at a swimming pool, he started thinking that if chlorine keeps pools sanitary, it could do the same for his toilets—and then he wouldn’t have to scrub them. But how to keep the bowl water chlorinated? Later at dinner, Eisen was inspired by the sour cream on his baked potato: he figured that if he put chlorine in a sour cream container, punched holes in it, and put it in his toilet tank, it would get a dose of chlorine every time it was flushed. It worked. He turned it into a product called 2000 Flushes, now the best selling toilet cleaner in America.
BRECK SHAMPOO. In 1898, at age 21, John Breck became America’s youngest fire chief. It didn’t make him happy, though—he was obsessed with the fact that he was going bald. He decided to take chemistry classes at a nearby college to see if he could save his hair. There, he hit on a solution: liquid shampoo. (At the time, Americans used bar soap on their hair—shampoos were used only in Europe). The shampoo he developed didn’t save his hair, but in 1908 it did become the inspiration for America’s first shampoo company.
DRAMAMINE. In 1949, a woman with a bad case of hives went to the Johns Hopkins Allergy Clinic in Baltimore. Her doctor gave her a prescription for a new drug he thought was an antihistimine. On her next visit, the woman’s hives were just as bad…but she was in good spirits. For once, she said, the motion of the streetcar she took to get there hadn’t made her sick. The doctor suspected the drug had something to do with it. So he gave her a placebo to see if she’d get motion sickness again. She did. He gave her the drug again—the motion sickness vanished. The clinic got the army to try it on soldiers “making a rough trans-Atlantic crossing via ship.” Worked fine. The drug
—Dramamine—became the standard treatment for motion sickness.
It’s estimated you’ll eat some 35,000 cookies in your lifetime.
OTHER PRESIDENTIAL FIRSTS
We all know the first president (Washington), the first president to serve more than two terms (FDR), and so on. But who was the first to be cloned? For that info, you need to turn to the Bathroom Reader.
The president: Gerald Ford
Notable first: First president to be a fashion model.
In the late 1930s, he was a student at Yale Law School. His girlfriend, a model, convinced him to put $1,000 into a modeling agency. His reward: He got to pose in skiwear ads with her.
The president: Richard Nixon
Notable first: First president to host a rock concert at the White House. Unlikely as it seems, Nixon invited the Guess Who and the Turtles to Washington to play for his daughters.
The president: Abraham Lincoln
Notable first: First president to be cloned.
Someday this may be big news. Now it’s just a curiosity. In 1990 a group of research scientists got permission to duplicate the DNA from Lincoln’s hair, blood, and skull (which they got from the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.), to find out whether he had a disease called Marfan’s syndrome.
The president: John Quincy Adams
Notable first: First president with a pet reptile.
Adams kept a pet alligator in the East Room of the White House. Historians say he enjoyed “the spectacle of guests fleeing from the room in terror.”
The president: George Washington
Notable first: First president to use “help wanted” ads to hire staff. Washington moved to New York—the U.S. capital—in 1789 and put a classified ad in the New York Daily Gazette requesting a coachman and a cook “for the Family of a President.” Apparently it was no great honor to work for a First Family—the ads ran for six weeks before the jobs were filled.
The first cereal to come in boxes? Shredded Wheat.
NOW HEAR THIS!
If you weren’t reading right now, you might be listening to a “personal tape player”—like a Walkman. But then when people started banging on the door, asking what you were doing in there, you wouldn’t hear them. Maybe they’d panic and think you were dead, like Elvis. They’d run outside and get a bunch of people to help break down the door. Wham! And there you’d be, completely oblivious. They’d get so mad that they’d attack you with the toilet plunger, which would get stuck to the top of your head. You’d have to go to the emergency room…and…well, aren’t you glad you’re reading Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader instead? Since it’s not safe to listen to a Walkman, we’ll print a story about it instead. It’s by Jack Mingo.
THE PRESSMAN
In the mid-1970s, a team of Sony engineers headed by Mitsuro Ida created the Pressman—a portable tape recorder that could fit into a shirt pocket. As Sony expected, it quickly became standard equipment for journalists. But there was one small problem: the Pressman recorded in mono, and radio journalists preferred working in stereo. They requested a stereo version.
Sony’s engineers put their best into it, shrinking stereo components, trying to get them into a small, pocket-sized case. They almost made it—but could only fit in the playback parts and two tiny speakers. Since the whole point was to come up with a tape recorder, the attempt was an embarrassing and expensive failure. Still, the quality of the sound was surprisingly good. So Ida kept the prototype around the shop instead of dismantling it. Some of the engineers started playing cassettes on it while they worked.
THE MISSING LINK
One day Masaru Ibuka wandered by. Although he’d co-founded the company with Akio Morita, he was considered too quirky and creative to fit into day-to-day operations. So he was made “honorary chairman”—a title that gave him much respect, little authority, and lots of time to wander the halls of Sony.
Ibuka stopped to watch the Pressman engineers working on their design problem. He heard music coming from the unsuccessful prototype and asked, “Where did you get this great little tape player?” Ida explained that it was a failure because it couldn’t record.
Wampum was once legally used as money in the United States.
Ibuka spent a lot of his time roaming around, so he knew what was going on all over the company. He suddenly remembered another project he’d seen that was being developed on the other side of the building—a set of lightweight portable headphones.
“What if you got rid of the speakers and added the headphones?” he asked Ida. “They’d use less power and increase the quality of the sound. Who knows, maybe we can sell this thing even if you can’t record on it.” The engineers listened politely and respectfully—while privately thinking the old man had finally lost it. Why make a tape recorder that can’t record?
LISTENING WELL
Ibuka took the gadget, with headphones attached, to Morita. He too was skeptical…until he heard the quality of the stereo music. To the shock of the engineering team, Morita gave it a green light. It was dubbed the Walkman, to go along with the Pressman.
The marketing department thought it was a terrible idea. They projected that the company would lose money on every unit sold. Even the name seemed wrong. According to American distributors, “Walkman” sounded “funny” to English ears. So Sony rolled the product out as the “Soundabout” in the U.S. and the “Stowaway” in England. Their 1979 publicity campaign—a low-budget, lukewarm affair aimed at teens—got virtually no results. It seemed as though the Walkman’s critics were right.
As it turned out, though, Sony had just targeted the wrong market. Teens had boom boxes…it was adults who wanted the Walkman. The little unit was perfect for listening to Mozart while jogging or the Stones while commuting, and was small enough to fit into a briefcase or the pocket of a business suit. To Sony’s surprise, white collar workers discovered the Walkman on their own. It became a sudden, raging success. Sony had prepared an initial run of 60,000 units; when the first wave hit, they sold out instantly.
The world still loves the Walkman and its offspring. By 1997, four million personal cassette players were sold a year.
The only rock that floats in water? Our experts say pumice.
FOUNDING FATHERS
You already know the names. Here’s who they belonged to.
Godfry Keebler. Opened a bakery in Philadelphia in 1853. His family expanded it. Today, Keebler is second-largest producer of cookies and crackers in the U.S.
Linus Yale, Jr. Invented the first combination locks and the first flat-key cylinder locks, in the 1860s. In 1868, the Yale Lock Company was formed to mass-produce his creations.
Joseph Campbell. A fruit merchant, he opened a canning factory in 1869. His specialties included jellies, salad dressing, and mincemeat—but not soup. The company added condensed soup in 1897. (First variety: tomato.)
Pleasant and John Hanes. Brothers who built a tobacco business in the late 1800s, then sold it in 1900. Each invested his profits in a textile company. John’s made socks and stockings; Pleasant’s made new-fangled two-piece men’s underwear. They were separate companies until 1962, when the families joined forces.
Carl Jantzen. Part owner of the Portland Knitting Mill. In 1910, at the request of a member of the Portland Rowing Club, he developed the first elasticized swimsuits. They became popular around the country as “Jantzens.” In 1920, the company changed its name to Jantzen.
John M. Van Heusen. Started the Van Heusen Shirt Company. In 1919 it became the first to sell dress shirts with collars attached. Developed a way to weave cloth on a curve in 1920, which made one-piece collars possible…and revolutionized the shirt industry.
Arthur Pitney and Walter Bowes. In 1901 Pitney created a machine that could stick postage stamps on letters. In 1920 he joined forces with Bowes. Because of WWI, there was a letter-writing boom, and the post office needed a machine to keep up. In 1920 Congress passed a bill allowing the Pitney-Bowes machine to handle the
mail.
Who’s won the most Oscars? Walt Disney—20 statuettes, 12 plaques and certificates.
HERE COMES THE SUN
Some facts about that big lightbulb in the sky, from astronomer (and BR1 member) Richard Moeschl.
It takes 8.3 minutes for the sun’s light—traveling at 186,282 miles a second—to reach Earth. (At that speed, light can travel around the Earth seven times in one second.)
The sun looks yellow-gold because we’re viewing it through the Earth’s atmosphere. Judging from its surface temperature, the sun’s color is probably closer to white.
The temperature of the sun at its core is around 73 million degrees F. It takes 50 years for this energy to reach the sun’s surface, where we can see it as light.
The English astronomer James Jeans once figured that if you placed a piece of the sun’s core the size of the head of a pin on Earth, its heat would kill a person 94 miles away.
The temperature of the sun’s photosphere, the part that sends us light, is about 10,000 degrees F.
The sun contains 99.9% of the matter in the solar system.
The sun produces more energy in one second than human beings have produced in all of our history. In less than a week, the sun sends out more energy than we could make by burning all the natural gas, oil, coal, and wood on Earth.
The total energy output of the sun is 1.92 calories per minute per square centimeter, or 3.83 x 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000000,000 watts.
The Earth receives 2 one-billionths of the sun’s power.
The amount of power that falls on each square foot of the Earth’s surface per minute is about 126 watts, enough to light two standard 60-watt lightbulbs.
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