Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Determining when a pear is ripe depends somewhat on the eater’s preference, but here is a time-honored method: hold the pear gently but firmly in the palm of your hand, as a baseball pitcher might hold the ball while studying the signs from the catcher. Apply the thumb of the same hand to the pear flesh just below the point where the stem joins the fruit. When the flesh beneath the spot yields evenly to gentle pressure from the thumb, it is ready to eat. If you have to push more than slightly, it’s not ready yet. After years of study, scientists have found that a really juicy pear is best eaten while naked, in the bathtub, so that you needn’t be concerned about the abundant juice streaming down your chin.

  Thank you, Professor Pear.

  Johnny will be back in the next Bathroom Reader, for the conclusion of “The Tonight Show” story.

  A snail breathes through its foot.

  THE SECRET OF INVISIBILITY

  Many years ago, during an extended visit to the bathroom, Uncle John entered a deep trance…and, suddenly, the secret of invisibility was revealed to him. And now we’d like to share it with you. Just follow these step-by-step instructions.

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  The Malaysian expression for “take a walk” translates as “eat the wind.”

  TWANG! A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR

  “More than any other instrument,” says Charlie McGovern of the Smithsonian Institution, “the electric guitar has been the dominant shaping force in American music in the last half-century. It completely changed the direction of the blues. It pretty much rechanneled country music. You can’t have rock-and-roll without it.” It’s also a relatively new instrument, whose history is still being written. Here’s a quick summary of what we know so far.

  THE PROBLEM WITH GUITARS

  • In the 1920s, people thought of the guitar exclusively as a rhythm instrument. In bands, there were few single-note guitar solos—guitar players strummed as hard as they could in the background, trying to be heard over the other instruments. As one critic observed:

  In the Chicago and New Orleans jazz bands…the guitar had a rough time. No matter how hard the frustrated picker picked, he was usually drowned out by all sorts of horns and some bully on an eighty-eight key, five-hundred pound piano.

  • Guitarists tried all sorts of tricks to be heard:

  — They tried putting megaphones under the strings.

  — They made bigger and bigger guitars.

  — They used National Steel Guitars, which were made out of metal and came with built-in resonators.

  — They put microphones up against the strings. This was a logical solution…except that microphones quickly produced feedback.

  ELECTRIFYING FIRST

  No one person can be considered the inventor of the electric guitar. But Lloyd Loar was the first to recognize their commercial potential.

  • In the mid-1920s Loar, an employee of the Gibson Guitar Company, invented a microphone that fit in a guitar and picked up the sound better than most microphones. He proposed that Gibson manufacture them, but they weren’t interested.

  The grey whale’s heart beats nine times a minute.

  • So Loar quit and formed his own company, Vivi-Tone, to manufacture “electric” guitars (acoustic guitars with a pick-up inserted). Unfortunately, he was ahead of his time, and quickly went out of business.

  THE 1930s.

  • Meanwhile, musicians all over the country were experimenting with their own ways to electrify guitars. In 1931, one inventor created the magnetic pickup—which “transformed string vibrations into electrical impulses that accurately reproduced sound.”

  • This breakthrough enabled the Rickenbacker Co., a tool-and-die maker, to manufacture a Hawaiian steel guitar with built-in pickups. They called it the “Frying Pan.” In Seattle a year later, Paul Tutmar founded his Audiovox company, the first to manufacture electric guitars exclusively.

  • But 1935 is generally considered the year the electric guitar was born. For the first time, major manufacturers—Gibson, Epiphone, and National—introduced electric models to the public.

  THE FIRST GUITAR HEROES

  Once the product was available on a wide basis, guitar players began showing the world what could be done with it.

  • In the mid-1930s, for example, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker became the first bluesman to fully exploit the electric by strutting across the stage, doing splits, and playing the guitar behind his back. With this technique, he foreshadowed the stunts and styles of future rock ’n’ roll greats like Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix. He also experimented with volume and feedback, demonstrating that it was the guitar and amplifier together—not the guitar alone—that made a new instrument.

  • But the guitar player who made the biggest difference was Charlie Christian, who played with Benny Goodman’s band from 1939 to 1941. He is credited with creating an identity for the electric guitar as a solo instrument. Christian would play staccato, hornlike, single-note phrases—a radical change from the accepted approach at the time. His style caused a revolution in technique and helped create the soon-to-be popular genre, bebop. In fact, his impact was so great the author of The Art and Times of the Guitar, wrote: “There is the guitar before Christian and the guitar after Christian, and they sound virtually like two different instruments.”

  Oregon has more ghost towns than any other state.

  THE SOLID-BODY GUITAR

  Until the 1940s, electric guitars were still semi-acoustic. It took two electronic geniuses to bring about the solid-body electric.

  Les Paul

  • Paul began experimenting with electric sounds in the late twenties by jamming his mother’s phonograph needle into the top of a guitar and plugging it in.

  • In the 1940s he created an early prototype of the solid-body, which he called “The Log.” It was little more than a 4′x4″ board with strings anchored to a door hinge and a guitar body attached over the top for looks. He brought it to Gibson, and again, the guitar-maker missed an opportunity to revolutionize the guitar world.

  • In 1952, when Gibson finally produced their first solid-body, they worked with Paul to create one of the most widely-used electric guitars ever made: the “Les Paul.”

  Leo Fender

  • Fender is regarded as the father of the modern electric guitar—though, ironically, he wasn’t even a musician. He just loved tinkering with electronics.

  • In 1948, Fender came out with a Spanish-style solid body electric guitar he called the “Broadcaster.” However, another music company owned that name; rather than go to court, he renamed it the “Telecaster.” It was still regarded as a novelty by most guitarists

  • It wasn’t until 1954, when he created the most popular electric guitar of all time—the Stratocaster—that the electric guitar came into its own. The Strat was a new design, not based on that of acoustic or semi-acoustic guitars. For example: Most guitars in the early 1950s were heavy, and dug into guitarists’ rib cages; Fender beveled the edges of the guitar so it would be more comfortable. The body was scalloped so every note on the neck was accessible; the volume and tone controls were in easy reach of the guitarist’s hands; and so on. These and a host of other changes made the Stratocaster revolutionary in the 1950s…and opened the door to the electric guitar’s popularity. Incredibly, the first Strats sold for only $75. Today they bring in as much as $20,000 as collectibles.

  Venetian blinds aren’t—they were invented in Japan.

  THE FIGHT FOR SAFE MILK, PART II

  On page 241 we told you about the battle to end the sale of adulterated milk. Part II is the story of the fight to pasteurize the U.S. milk supply. It’s an instructive tale. In spite of proof that pasteurization could save lives, Americans resisted it because it was a new idea…and because it “cost too much.”

  SOLID PROGRESS


  During the latter part of the 19th century, improvements were made in the quality of the milk sold in the United States.

  Bottles: In 1884, for example, Dr. Henry G. Thatcher patented the first practical glass milk bottle with a sealable top. He got the idea while standing in line in the street for his own milk a year earlier. When the little girl ahead of him dropped her filthy rag doll into the milk dealer’s open milk can, the dealer just shook the doll off, handed it back to the girl, then ladled Thatcher’s milk as though nothing had happened.

  Thatcher’s bottle wasn’t a solution to all of raw milk’s problems, but at least it kept impurities out of milk after it left the dairy. Many dairies hated the bottles because they were expensive and broke relatively easily, but they caught on with the public and were soon in use all over the country.

  The Lactometer: In the early 1890s, New York State began regulating the content of milk using a lactometer, a newly invented device that could measure the amount of milk solids in milk. For the first time, it was possible to compare pure milk with a test sample of a dairy’s milk to see if it had been watered down or adulterated. If the milk tested didn’t contain the same amount of milk solids as pure milk, the milk dealer could be fined or penalized.

  BATTLING BACTERIA

  But by far, the most important breakthroughs were scientific.

  Five U.S. presidents have had the first name James, more than any other name.

  The 1880s and 1890s were a period of great advancement in the understanding of bacteria and its role in causing disease.

  In 1882, for example, a German scientist named Robert Koch discovered that bovine tuberculosis, a form of tuberculosis found in cattle, could be spread to humans through diseased milk. This form of tuberculosis attacked the glands, intestines, and bones, frequently killing the afflicted or leaving them deformed for life.

  “Children seemed to be especially susceptible to bovine tuberculosis,” James Cross Gilbin writes in Milk: The Fight for Purity. “[Victims] often spent years strapped into spinal frames…designed to prevent deformity while the body slowly overcame the infection.”

  Researchers discovered other diseases could be spread by milk as well. They found that if a cow’s udders weren’t cleaned before milking, bacteria from manure (or anything else on the udders) could fall into the milk. And if the person milking the cow was sick, their germs could infect the milk, too. There seemed to be no limit to the number of ways that milk could be infected with disease.

  PASTEURIZATION

  As it turns out, the solution to this problem had already been found. In the 1860s, French chemist Louis Pasteur invented the process of pasteurization, which uses heat to kill bacteria that cause liquids like milk and beer to spoil. But because his ideas were revolutionary, they spread slowly. The idea of pasteurizing milk didn’t arrive in the United States until the 1880s—and even then, it took more than 30 years to find wide acceptance! That acceptance came largely through the work of one man.

  MILKMAN

  In the 1890s, Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s department store in New York, was already building a reputation as a philanthropist. In the winter of 1892, he distributed 1.5 million buckets of coal to impoverished New Yorkers so they could heat their homes. The following year, he organized a series of shelters that provided beds and breakfasts to the city’s homeless population. In 1893 he tackled the problem of unsafe milk.

  Straus had been reading up on Pasteur’s work and the theoretical benefits of pasteurization. He knew that nearly 10% of all children born in New York City died by the age of five—and despite all the recent improvements in milk quality, he still suspected that milk was to blame for many of the deaths. His reasoning was simple: Milk spoiled quicker in the heat of summer, and the city’s childhood mortality rate increased at the same time. He figured there had to be a connection between the two.

  As far as anyone can tell, only humans get headaches.

  MILK BAR

  In June 1893, Straus set up a milk-processing station in a neighborhood on East Third Street. The station pasteurized milk on the spot, then provided it at affordable prices to local families. The station also offered free medical exams for children and free hygiene advice for their mothers. Mothers who couldn’t afford 2¢ for a pint or 4¢ for a quart of milk (less than the price of unpasteurized milk) could get coupons for free milk from local doctors and charities.

  By the turn of the century, Straus had twelve milk stations in different parts of the city, distributing hundreds of thousands of bottles of pasteurized milk every year. He also had several milk stands where people could taste pasteurized milk for a penny a glass, to see for themselves that pasteurization didn’t hurt the taste.

  THE ORPHAN TEST

  The final proof of the benefits of pasteurized milk came when Straus began providing milk to an orphanage that had seen death rates as high as 42% from tuberculosis and other milk-borne diseases. The orphanage was located on Randall’s Island in the East River. All the milk it used was provided by a single herd of cows kept on the island, so it was easy to control the milk the orphans drank.

  Straus started pasteurizing the orphanage’s milk in 1898. Within a year, the mortality rate dropped to 28%, and continued downward in the years that followed.

  AN UPHILL FIGHT

  By the turn of the century, pasteurized milk stations like Straus’s had been set up in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other major cities. The programs were voluntary and were run by charities. Although philanthropists were getting into the pasteurized milk business, the dairy industry was staying out of it. Citing the added cost of pasteurization, they refused to pasteurize their own milk, and blocked efforts to require it by law.

  Prohibition didn’t end in Mississippi until 1966.

  Another huge barrier was public resistance: most people were used to “pure” raw milk, and didn’t understand science well enough to insist on pasteurization. The few dairies that had begun pasteurizing milk to increase shelf life and prevent spoiling did so mostly in secret, out of fear of losing sales to raw milk dairies.

  Straus was instrumental in getting New York to create the post of inspector of dairy farms, making it one of the first cities in the nation to inspect the quality of milk at the source. In 1907, Straus tried to help pass a city ordinance requiring the pasteurization of all milk sold in New York. Many milk distributors, doctors, and even the city’s Health Department opposed him, arguing that the health benefits of “clean raw milk” outweighed the risks. The ordinance failed.

  PRESIDENTIAL SEAL OF APPROVAL

  In 1907, the reform-minded president Teddy Roosevelt ordered his Public Health Service to look into the pros and cons of pasteurized milk. In 1908 the Service issued its report: Pasteurization, they found, did not affect the taste, quality, nutrition or digestibility of milk, but it did “prevent much sickness and save many lives.”

  Compulsory pasteurization was still many years away, though. A second attempt to require pasteurization of New York City’s milk supply was defeated in 1909, and a similar ordinance that had passed in Chicago in 1908 was repealed in 1910 after the courts ruled the measure interfered with free trade.

  Finally in 1911, the National Commission on Milk Standards issued a report arguing that “in the case of all milk not either certified or inspected, pasteurization should be compulsory.” The American Medical Association followed with similar advice a few months later. These reports and others like them ignited a grounds-well of public support for compulsory pasteurization. In 1912, Chicago passed a second pasteurization ordinance; this one stuck. New York passed a similar ordinance, but milk distributors succeeded in delaying and then watering down the law.

  10% of all Dalmations are born deaf.

  THE FINAL STRAW

  In 1913, a typhoid fever epidemic struck New York claiming thousands of victims. By now there was proof that typhoid fever was carried by milk, and that it could be killed through pasteurization. New York City finally st
opped dragging its feet. By the end of 1914, 95 percent of the city’s milk supply was pasteurized. By 1917, nearly all of the 50 largest cities in the nation required pasteurization; the rest of the country would follow over the next several years.

  The impact of pasteurized milk on public health was nothing short of astounding. In 1885 the infant mortality in New York City was 273 per 1,000 live births—more than 27%. By 1915 the infant mortality rate was 94 per 1,000, a drop of two-thirds.

  PASTEURIZATION TODAY

  Today the most popular method of pasteurization is called “flash pasteurization” or “high-temperature, short-time” pasteurization (HTST). Raw milk is heated to 161° Fahrenheit and kept at that temperature for only 15 seconds, and then immediately cooled to 50° Fahrenheit.

  Products like half-and-half and whipping cream, which are expected to remain refrigerated for longer periods of time, are processed by “ultra-high temperature” pasteurization at 280° Fahrenheit for two seconds.

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  Top 5 U.S. ice cream toppings: hot fudge, cold fudge, caramel, butterscotch, and strawberry.

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