AIRPLANE
Ever notice how a fast runner seems to glide over the ground, barely touching it, while a big plodding jogger seems to make the ground shake? Air acts the same way. The faster it is moving, the less pressure it exerts. Remember that. It will be important later.
Now we’ve got a plane knifing through the air. Air molecules are just standing there, minding their own business, chatting with their neighbors, when suddenly they are sliced apart by this wing. Air molecules react in a strange way when this happens. They race desperately along the top and bottom of the wing, looking for each other.
The top of the wing is curved; the bottom is straight. So the air at the top has a longer distance to travel than the air on the bottom. But, driven by some primal atmospheric instinct (actually, by a nearly incomprehensible law of fluid dynamics) they arrive at the same time. How did they do this? The air on the top of the wing moved faster than the air at the bottom!
According to Billboard magazine, the #1 single of the 1950s was “Don’t Be Cruel,” by Elvis. (1956)
Faster air above the wing, slower air below the wing. That means there is more pressure under the wing than above it, and the wing rises, carrying the plane with it.
B
BATTERY
The battery works for the same reason that fillings hurt when you bite into aluminum foil. (See Fillings, why they hurt.)
BLUE, WHY SKY IS
You must first understand what “blue” is. Blue is a color, one which, like pornography, defies easy definition, though we sure know it when we see it. Scientists can measure blue. It is what “light” looks like when it is coming at us in a particular wavelength (OK, you nerds, it’s 480 nanometers).
Wavelength, we rush to say, is not a word to be feared. It is not even in the same league as, for example, Stakhanovism (see Names to Impress Your Date). A wavelength is just what it sounds like. A wave. Of a certain length. Blue has shorter wavelengths, red longer. The sunlight, a mixture of lights of all sorts of wavelengths, comes bounding into the clear sky from deep space. It hits the air molecules and starts ricocheting all over the place. With every skip, every bounce, many of the longer light waves—red—get soaked up by the molecules. But the blue keeps bouncing around. (This is a function of the shape and shimmy of air molecules.) By the time the light zigzags into our eyes, it’s mostly blue.
This is when dust comes into the picture. Dust has a different shape from air molecules, a different shimmy. It soaks up the blue light. The less dust in the sky, the bluer it is. At dawn and dusk the sunlight comes in at a low angle, and must wade through gobs and gobs of dust hovering close to the Earth. So the sky turns orange, and then red.
BOMB, HYDROGEN, how to build
We are going to tell you the secret of the hydrogen bomb. The secret is a substance as familiar as your morning cup of coffee. Now keep all this stuff to yourself. Inside a hydrogen bomb is an old-fashioned atom bomb that looks just like a soccer ball. It’s the trigger. That’s how mean hydrogen bombs are. They use atom bombs just to get them started. Below the atom bomb is a carrot-shaped container o nuclear fuel—various types of hydrogen atoms. The theory is this: Blow up the soccer ball, and the pressure will cause the carrot to compress, fusing the hydrogen atoms together. This simulates the events in the center of the sun. As two hydrogen atoms become one helium atom, they lose some of their weight. The lost weight, or mass, is converted to pure energy. KA-BLAMM!
Take that, George Bush: Americans ate 940% more broccoli in 1996 than they did in 1971.
The big problem is convincing the atomic bomb blast to squeeze the hydrogen evenly, the way you would crush a beer can, rather than just knock the whole contraption to kingdom come. The answer is to build the bomb like a Thermos (see Thermos) with “radiation reflectors” on the inside. A Thermos uses shiny glass, a hydrogen bomb uses super-thin sheets of Uranium-238, a metal. When the soccer ball explodes, there is a period of one-millionth of a second before the fireball can even begin to move, when invisible gamma rays and X-rays surge outward at the speed of light, bounce off the reflective casing, and pile-drive back into the carrot of hydrogen. The atoms fuse. And you get more bang for your buck.
Scientists needed something that would hold the carrot in place during the rocky ride from silo to target. But it had to be a special something: strong, yet totally unable to slow down or reflect the pressure from the atom bomb explosion. They looked and looked for the right material. Finally they got it: styrofoam.
A one-megaton bomb, big enough to thoroughly flatten Miami, would be the size of a suitcase. It would fit under your bed.
C
CAMERA, POLAROID
Light peeks through the shutter, hits the film. The film is like plywood. It has layers, each coated with silver bromide. The film is designed so that the top layer reacts to blue light. The next reacts to yellow. The next, red. As the sheet of film is ejected, the camera douses it with dyes. Red dye sticks to the part of the film that reacted to the red light. Same with the blue and yellow.
When the dyes soak through to the bottom layer—the layer that you will put in your photo album—blue, red and yellow dye are represented in approximately the same intensity and the same place within the picture frame as the light from the original image. We stress “approximately.”
The United States has the most tornadoes in the world—more than 700 a year.
CHIP, SILICON
The breakthrough that made small, efficient computers possible. Computers are basically machines that utilize the great speed of electricity to make millions of decisions in a matter of seconds. Computers see no grays: every problem is reduced to a series of yes-no decisions indicated by the turning on, or off, of a current. (Question: Is the number seven a prime number? Computer’s methodology: Is it evenly divisible by two? No. By three? No. By four? No. By five? No. By six? No. Answer: Yes, it is a prime number.)
This process, though fast, requires astoundingly elaborate circuitry, resembling a bafflingly complex street map, miles and miles of printed circuits forking off in all sorts of directions, wherever the options and alternatives take it. Original computers did this with wires and solder, and all of the circuitry required them to be the size of a 7-Eleven.
The silicon chip is a fingernail-sized slab which can be mass-produced and upon which tens of thousands of tiny, discrete circuits can be etched.
CLOCKS, DASHBOARD How they work: They don’t.
CORK, how it gets into champagne bottles
The mushroom-shaped cork is steam-heated until it is very spongy, and then it is crammed into the bottle with a cramming tool. OK, so if it is so warm and mushy and slides in so easily, why doesn’t it pop right back out from the pressure of the gas? Because at the time it is corked, champagne is flatter than Alfalfa singing “Lady of Spain.” It earns its bubbles later, through fermentation in the bottle. By that time, the cork is dry and fat and holding fast.
D
DATE, names to impress your
Bruno, Giordano. In the 17th century he conceived of the universe as being infinite in time and space, filled with suns surrounded by planets. For this revelation he was accused of heresy and burned at the stake.
How much water in a cubic mile of fog? Less than a gallon.
Condamine, Charles Marie dela. Went to South America in 1735 to measure curvature of the Earth. Instead he discovered rubber.
Ham. First American chimpanzee in space. Emerged from capsule snarling, tried to bite photographers.
Semmelweis, Ignaz. A Hungarian physician in 1847, discovered concept of germs. Suggested doctors wash their hands once in a while. Infant mortality plummeted.
Stakhanov, Aleksei. Miserable Russian coal miner who worked so hard and so efficiently he yanked out seven times as much coal as the average miserable coal miner. In 1935 the Soviet government announced the start of “Stakhanovism,” a system in which workers are encouraged to increase production, which no doubt sent a big thrill through the shafts.
Tull, Jethro. English agriculturist, brought horseshoes to England from France in early 18th century.
F
FACTS, UNTRUE, that refuse to die
The Missing Link. Supposedly an extinct creature halfway between apes and humans on the evolutionary chart. It’s not missing. Or if it is, no one’s looking for it. Darwin didn’t say humans evolved from apes. Both evolved from a common ancestor—an extinct apelike creature.
Double-jointed people. No such thing. In some people, the ligaments that attach muscle to bone are more elastic.
Positive to negative flow of electricity. Wiring diagrams always show current flowing from positive to negative. But it’s the other way around. The mistake was made by Benjamin Franklin after his famous experiment with the kite. Once the error was discovered there were too many books in print to change.
Columbus sailing off the edge of the world. No one was actually worried about this. Pythagoras proposed a spherical world as early as the sixth century B.C. Then, in the second century A.D., the Roman astronomer Ptolemy proved the Earth was spherical, pointing out the round shadow of the Earth during a lunar eclipse, and the obvious fact that the masts of sailboats come into view on the horizon before the hull.
Every second, your senses send about 100 million different messages to your brain.
The Fifth Dimension. A 1960s pop group. As far as spatial and temporal dimensions are concerned, we know of only four: length, breadth, height, and time. It was the last that finished off the singing group.
What steam looks like. It looks like nothing. You can’t see steam, just as you can’t see any gas. What you think is steam is actually condensed water vapor. Look at the spout of a steaming kettle. There is a brief space, just outside the spout, where you cannot see anything. That’s steam.
FILLINGS, why they hurt when you bite into aluminum foil
What you are feeling is the basic fact of nature that makes batteries possible. There are two kinds of substances that can conduct electricity. One kind is just dying to send its electrons off on imperialistic forays; the other is so willing to take in foreign electrons that it will accept even those with obviously faked passports.
But despite all the intentions, the electrons can’t go anywhere without a middle man to negotiate the passage. In your mouth, saliva serves this purpose admirably, creating a slick path from the aluminum foil to the metal alloy in your filling. There is a mass migration of electrons (an electric current), which, when it occurs in the area of your back molar, comes as something of a shock. In the typical car battery, the electron donor and recipient are carbon and zinc, and the conducting liquid is sulfuric acid.
G
GUILLOTINE, consciousness after use of
Named after French physician J. I. Guillotin (1738-1814), who improved upon previous designs by angling the blade, making it more of a slicer than a chopper. Because of oxygen stored in the brain at any given moment, says Dade County Chief Medical Examiner Joe Davis, an executed person is probably conscious for up to 10 seconds after the beheading, and can probably see and hear. We checked it out with a few neurologists. They were sharply divided on the subject.
Sophie, did you know that a pig has 44 teeth?
H
HEISENBERG’S
UNCERTAINTY
PRINCIPLE
You’re at a cocktail party. Clive, whom you hate, is acting superior. You make an innocuous comment to the effect that it must be 100 degrees outside. Clive says, “Of course, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that it is impossible to make a completely accurate measurement.” Here’s what you should say: “Fool! Dolt! Boob! Heisenberg said it is impossible to determine simultaneously and with unlimited accuracy the position and the momentum of a particle, but because Planck’s Constant is so small, the Uncertainty Principle is meaningless except when discussing the motion of atomic particles, like electrons. Idiot.” Hopefully this outburst will help quell future references to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
HELIUM, source of
It sends balloons, and your voice, high. It’s a naturally occurring element, but where does it occur? In the ground.
Helium is mined from gas wells in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The United States is the world’s leading helium producer, and relations with Germany were sorely strained before World War II when we refused to sell the stuff to Hitler. He wanted it for his zeppelins, but he had to make do with the highly volatile hydrogen instead. Which explains why the Hindenburg blew up over New Jersey in 1937.
HUMOR, sense of
A “sense of humor” is a measurement of the extent to which you notice that you’re trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel about this.
L
LIGHTBULB
You flip a switch, and, godlike, you create light. But don’t bask in the glow too long. Better to give credit where it’s due—the electron, a basic component of matter so filled with energy it can’t sit still for an instant.
Electrons usually can be found zipping around the nuclei of their atoms at unfathomable speeds, trapped by an attractive force. But given a little shove, the electrons of certain elements—notably metals—are only too happy to promiscuously bounce from nucleus to nucleus.
What is the oldest letter in the alphabet? O. It’s more than 3,000 years old.
The shove comes from a flood of free electrons produced by a generator or a battery. The flood turns into a torrent, cascading through the metal pathway—the wire—at close to the speed of light. This little drill actually produces light because not all materials carry electrons as freely as, say, copper wire.
The tungsten element in the center of a 60-watt lightbulb is not nearly so casual about its electrical relations. This unwelcome intrusion of three billion billion electrons a second plowing through its personal space causes a fit of apoplexy. It gets hot. White hot, in fact. It would burn itself to ash in no time, which was the slight flaw in early light bulb designs, except that the interior of the modern glass bulb is an airless vacuum. The lack of surrounding oxygen allows the filament to burn and glow in impotent rage for weeks before it loses its cool completely.
M
MATCH
Most tools seem complex but are actually fairly simple. Matches are the opposite. The humility of their design belies a deeper engineering genius. Consider: The common match was invented in 1805, nearly 200 years after the first telescope.
For much of the 19th century, workers in match factories succumbed to a horrible disease called “phossy jaw.” We won’t describe it.
There are actually two types of matches, the “Safety Match” and the “Strike-Anywhere Match.” For simplicity’s sake we will refer to the latter as the “Dangerous Match.” The Dangerous Match can be lit with your fingernail, or, if you’re as tough as Clint Eastwood in those old spaghetti westerns, your beard. The tip is coated in a chemical called phosphorus. White phosphorus is so flammable it bursts into flame upon contact with the air. There is more than a pound of the stuff in a human body, in blood, muscles, bones and teeth. Why don’t teeth burst into flame when you talk? That’s for another volume of the Encyclopedia Bathroomica. Know now simply that the modern Dangerous Match uses red phosphorus, calmer than its white cousin. Rub the match on sandpaper or any rough surface and the friction heats the match to the ignition point. The flame then fires down into the match’s “tinder,” easy-to-burn chemicals like sulfur, potassium chlorate, and charcoal, melded together with glue and wax.
Take a guess, Jesse—how many times do you breathe in a year? About 10 million.
But there’s also dirt bits and powdered glass down there, to keep things under control. To make things yet more comfy for all concerned, the entire stick of wood has been soaked in a chemical that prevents smoldering.
The Safety Match is a radical departure. The thinking behind the Safety Match is that although the phosphorus and the “tinder” are wild and unpredictable when stuck
together, they are harmless and mediocre when solo, like Lennon and McCartney. So the phosphorus is not even on the match, it’s on the box, or the “pack,” what have you. You know, on that black scratchy strip. To light the Safety Match one simply has to press it against the strip, “close cover before striking,” and yank, unless the match in question is the last in the pack, in which case it will not light no matter how many billion times you try.
O
OVEN, MICROWAVE
No doubt it will not enlighten you to hear that microwaves are a type of high-frequency electromagnetic wave that penetrates food and causes atoms to violently agitate, creating “heat.”
Figure it like this. Right there in your kitchen is a radio station, KMWV. This station plays only one rock group, over and over, called Magnetron. Magnetron’s music is so stupid only food can hear it. The little food molecules react by doing a dance. First the molecules line up in rigid formation. Then they suddenly flip around, facing the opposite direction. Back and forth, back and forth, kind of like the Twist or maybe even the Time Warp. They do this a couple billion times every second. It’s what you call a fast dance.
An exterminator once told us that a microwave could not kill a roach. So we called an entomologist at the University of Florida to see if this was true. He did an experiment.
Q: What do you do every 2 to 10 seconds?A: Blink.
Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader Page 53