“Because of Curie,” Feldman writes, “newspapers around the globe changed their way of reporting the Nobel Prize, generating endless publicity, and thereby finally changing the meaning of the awards.”
It was tabloids as much as talent, that made the Nobel Prizes as popular as they are today.
Want to win a Nobel Prize? Turn to page 312 to find out how.
MONKEY BUSINESS
The Swedish newspaper Expressen gave 10,000 kronor ($1,250) each to five stock-market analysts and one chimp named Ola. They were free to play the market as they wished, the goal being to make the biggest profit. The humans used their expertise; Ola picked his stocks by throwing darts at the financial page. A month later, Ola was 1,541 kronor ($190) richer and the winner of the competition.
Poll: 68% of teenage girls said if they could change one body part, it would be their stomach.
THE SAGA OF SILLY PUTTY
What’s stretchy and bouncy and comes in an egg? Silly question. Here’s one of Uncle John’s favorite toy stories: the origin of Silly Putty.
THE WRIGHT STUFF
During World War II, Japanese invasions of rubber-producing countries in the Far East vastly reduced the availability of rubber in the U.S. In the early 1940’s, the U.S. War Production Board asked General Electric for help in developing a cheap substitute that could be used in the production of boots and tires.
G.E. hired an engineer named James Wright to head the project.
In 1943 Wright accidentally dropped some boric acid into silicone oil. Result: he created an unusual compound that stretched further and bounced higher than rubber. Not only that, it was impervious to mold, didn’t decay the way rubber did, and stayed stretchy and bouncy in extreme temperatures. The only problem was that neither scientists nor the military could find a good use for the stuff. In 1945, G.E. mailed samples to scientists all over the world, to see if they could figure out what to do with it.
GETTING SILLY
An advertising copyrighter named Paul Hodgson was at a party where one of the samples was being passed around. No one was coming up with any scientific uses for it, but they sure were having fun playing with it. To Hodgson it was clear: This was a toy.
It just happened that Hodgson was in the process of creating a catalog for a local toy store. He convinced the owner of the shop to feature what he dubbed “Bouncing Putty.” It outsold everything else in the catalog (except a 50-cent box of crayons). Still, the store owner wasn’t interested in manufacturing or marketing it, so Hodgson bought the rights and went into business himself. He renamed the product Silly Putty.
In 1950 Hodgson bought 21 pounds of the putty for $147 and hired a Yale college student to cut it up into one-ounce balls and put it into plastic eggs. Sales were slow at first, but Silly Putty’s big break came several months later when it was mentioned in The New Yorker magazine. Hodgson’s phone started ringing off the hook. He received 250,000 orders in only four days. A few years later, Silly Putty was racking up sales of over six million dollars annually—Hodgson was a millionaire.
The average reader can read 275 words per minute.
Today, Binney & Smith, makers of Crayola, own the rights to Silly Putty and produce about 500 pounds of it every day. Over 300 million eggs have been sold since its inception—enough to form a ball of Silly Putty the size of the Goodyear Blimp. It now comes in 16 different colors including glow-in-the-dark, glitter, and hot flourescent colors. In 2000 Metallic Gold Silly Putty was introduced to celebrate the toy’s 50th anniversary. There’s even Silly Putty that changes color depending on the temperature of your hands. In 2001 Silly Putty was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, taking its place beside such classics as G.I. Joe, Lincoln Logs, and Monopoly.
SILLY PUTTY FACTS
• In 2000 Binny & Smith sponsored a “Silliest Uses for Silly Putty Contest.” The winner: replace your stockbroker by throwing a ball of Silly Putty at the stock page in the newspaper and investing in whatever stock it lifts from the newsprint. (Second place went to the woman who suggested it could be used to form a fake swollen gland to get out of an unwanted date.)
• One of the original Silly Putty eggs is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
• Silly Putty cost a dollar in 1950 when it was first introduced, and still cost a dollar in 1976 when Hodgson died. Price in 2002: still under $2.
• Why did Hodgson pack Silly Putty in eggs? It was Easter.
• In 1968 Apollo 8 astronauts used a new adhesive to fasten down tools during their voyage into weightlessness: Silly Putty.
• In 1989 a grad student at Alfred University wanted to find out what would happen to a ball of Silly Putty dropped from a roof. He dropped a 100-lb. ball from the top of a three-story building. The ball first bounced about eight feet into the air, but it shattered into pieces on the second bounce.
In 2001 Indian railroads cited 14 million people for riding without a ticket.
UNCLE JOHN’S MEDICINE CABINET
There’s a story behind every item in your medicine cabinet. Here are a few.
• Before World War I, “Aspirin” was a registered trademark of the German company, Bayer. When Germany lost the war, Bayer gave the trademark to the Allies as a reparation in the Treaty of Versailles.
• Why do men wear fragrances? Isn’t that a little “girly?” It used to be. But thanks to some clever marketing during World War II, Old Spice aftershave became part of the soldier’s standard-issue toiletry kit and changed the smell of things.
• Hate taking care of your contact lenses? It could be worse. Early contacts were made from wax molds (wax was poured over the eyes). The lenses, made of glass, cut off tear flow and severely irritated the eyes. In fact, the whole ordeal was so painful that scientists recommended an anesthetic solution of cocaine.
• On average, each person uses 54 feet of dental floss every year. That may sound like a lot, but dentists recommend the use of a foot and a half of dental floss each day. That’s equal to 548 feet a year.
• In the late 1940s, aerosol hairspray was a growing fad among American women. The only problem was that it was water insoluble, which made it hard to wash out. Why? The earliest fixative was shellac, more commonly used to preserve wood.
• Women ingest about 50% of the lipstick they apply.
• Ancient Chinese, Roman, and German societies frequently used urine as mouthwash. Surprisingly, the ammonia in urine is actually a good cleanser. (Ancient cultures had no way of knowing that.)
• Almost half of all men who have dyed their hair were talked into it the first time by a woman.
A recent check of 62 police cars in Atlanta, Georgia, found that 27 had expired tags.
SORRY, CHARLIE
A whole page of gossip about famous people named Charles.
Charlie Sheen. When he was engaged to actress Kelly Preston, he accidentally shot her in the arm. She left him and married John Travolta.
Prince Charles. As a child, he was teased so much about the size of his ears that his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten told the queen to surgically fix the “problem.” The queen declined. The prince’s ears remain big to this day.
Charles Lindbergh. His father was a U.S. congressman. During a visit to the Capitol as a boy, he locked the doors of the bathroom and threw lightbulbs onto the street below.
Charlie Brown. If he were a real person, he’d be four and a half feet tall: his head would take up two of those feet, his body another two feet, and his legs six inches. Also, his head would be two feet wide.
Charles Barkley. After Tonya Harding called herself the “Charles Barkley of figure skating,” Barkley said this: “My initial response was to sue her for defamation of character, but then I realized that I had no character.”
Charles Darwin. Born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, Darwin originally wanted to be a doctor, but had to give it up because he “wasn’t smart enough.”
Charlie Chaplin. His mansion was next
door to notorious Hollywood rake John Barrymore’s. Chaplin installed a telescope to spy on his neighbor’s nightly exploits.
Charlie Chan. From 1925 to 1949, there were 47 movies made about the fictional Chinese detective. Six actors played Chan—not one was Chinese.
Q: Why are giraffes highly susceptible to throat infections?
BANANA PEELS
To most people, the banana peel is little more than a convenient wrapper around the fruit. We told you the history of the banana on page 143…but it turns out the peel has a story too.
SLIPPERY SUBJECT
Early 20th-century cities had a huge garbage problem. In those days, litter was a part of urban life—it was everywhere. In the wealthier areas of town, streets were cleaned on a regular basis, but in the poorer neighborhoods, they weren’t. The result: the streets were polluted with rotting food, horse manure, and trash.
And then came the banana. By the late 1890s, better transportation methods made the banana so cheap that it became a common snack food, particularly popular among the working class. What happened to the peel after the banana was eaten? It ended up on the street.
Magazines, such as Harper’s Weekly warned that “whosoever throws banana skins on the sidewalk does a great unkindness to the public, and is quite likely to be responsible for a broken limb.” The Sunday School Advocate told the story of a man who slipped and broke his leg, which had to be amputated. Unable to work, he saw his family end up in a poorhouse. “All this sorrow,” the Advocate said, “was caused by the bit of banana peel which Miss Sweet-tooth dropped on the sidewalk.”
Banana peels were certainly no worse than all the other refuse on the street. But they were bright yellow, which made them highly visible, so they quickly became a symbol of a trash problem that was already out of control…and getting worse.
THE BIG APPLE
New York was the first city to seriously address the trash problem. The police department had been responsible for keeping the streets clean, but the men appointed by the police often did little more than just collect their paychecks. In 1895 Col. George E. Waring, Jr. was appointed the new Commissioner of Streets, assigned to overhaul the ineffective street-cleaning system. A military man, he required his sanitation workers to wear white uniforms and and instilled a sense of pride in them. Parades of the uniformed street cleaners impressed city residents and slowly raised public awareness about the importance of clean streets.
It would be years before anti-littering and “Beautify America” campaigns permanantly changed the national landscape. But the banana was the turning point. The new science of city sanitation spread to other cities, and within a few years the banana peel, once a symbol of filth and ignorance, became synonymous with the movement for clean city streets.
A: 1) Long throats. 2) They can’t cough.
FIVE THINGS TO DO WITH BANANA PEELS
Is the banana peel just trash? Some people claim it has beneficial uses:
• To get rid of a wart, tape a one-inch square of banana peel over the wart, inside part against your skin. Change the dressing every day or so until the wart is gone—probably within a month or two.
• Use the same treatment to get rid of a splinter. Tape a piece of peel over the splinter. By morning the enzymes (or something) in the peel should bring the splinter to the surface.
• To draw the color from a bruise, hold a banana peel over it for 10 to 30 minutes.
• In the late 1960s, a rumor spread that the inner part of the peel contained an hallucinogenic substance called banadine. Supposedly one could smoke it and get legally high. It didn’t work (trust Uncle John), but for historical purposes only, here’s the recipe:
1. Take 15 pounds of ripe yellow bananas. 2. Peel them. 3. Scrape off the insides of the skins with a knife. 4. Put all scraped material into a large pot and add water. Boil for three to four hours until it gets a pastelike consistency. 5. Spread this paste on cookie sheets and dry it in an oven for about 20 minutes. This will result in a fine black powder (banadine), which you roll into a cigarette and smoke. Supposedly you’ll feel something after smoking three or four. (Unfortunately, it’s a really bad headache.)
• To relieve the headache you just got from smoking a banana peel, tape or hold the inner side of a banana peel to the forehead and the nape of the neck. Supposedly the peels increase the electrical conductivity between the two spots.
In the 3 weeks that baby sparrows are in the nest, Mom and Dad make 5,000 trips for food.
URBAN LEGENDS
We’re back with one of our most popular features. Remember the rule of thumb for an urban legend: if a wild story sounds a bit too “perfect” to be true, then it probably isn’t.
THE LEGEND: A young woman who lives near a beach becomes pregnant but swears it’s a mistake. It turns out that she accidentally swallowed microscopic octopus eggs while swimming and has a baby octopus growing inside her, spreading its tentacles to various parts of her body.
HOW IT SPREAD: The story was first published in the Boston Traveler in the 1940s and is kept alive mainly in coastal towns.
THE TRUTH: No medical records have ever been found to verify this story, but the universal fear of foreign bodies growing inside us keeps it afloat. Similar legends exist about eating pregnant cockroaches in fast food.
THE LEGEND: The Chevy Nova had dismal sales in Latin American countries because in Spanish the word Nova sounds like no va, which translates to “doesn’t go.”
HOW IT SPREAD: It began circulating in business manuals and seminars in the 1980s warning of the follies of failing to do adequate market research before releasing products in foreign markets. It spread from there to newspaper columnists. (Even Uncle John was duped—we included it in The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.)
THE TRUTH: When Chevrolet first released the Nova in Mexico, Venezuela, and other Spanish-speaking countries in 1972, the car sold just fine, even better than expected in Venezuela. According to www.snopes.com’s Urban Legends page, the very nature of the tale is absurd:
Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word “Nova” as equivalent to the phrase “no va” and think, “Hey, this car doesn’t go!” is akin to assuming that English speakers would spurn a dinette set sold under the name “Notable” because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn’t include a table.
Even “clean” air may contain as many as 1,500 specks of dust per cubic inch.
THE LEGEND: Teenagers drive around looking for open car windows at red traffic lights, yell, “Spunkball!” and throw a gasoline-soaked rag with a lit firecracker connected to it, hoping to start a fire inside the vehicle.
HOW IT SPREAD: Via e-mail, beginning in February 2000.
THE TRUTH: This is another variation on a common urban legend—the “gang initiation” legend. (Like the one about someone who flashed a friendly warning at an oncoming car without lights, only to be shot dead by recently-initiated gang members.) No police reports or news items exist to substantiate either legend. The “spunkball” e-mail looked even more credible when the name Bea Maggio, FCLS, Allstate Insurance Co., began appearing underneath it. After reading it, she supposedly passed it along to some friends—not in a company capacity—but just as a regular concerned (and duped) citizen. Her name stuck with the e-mail, giving it an “official” look, but have no fear, there’s nothing official about it.
THE LEGEND: Walt Disney’s body was cryogenically stored after he died in 1966, with instructions to reanimate him when the technology is available. He’s supposedly stored underneath “The Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland.
HOW IT SPREAD: The story began in the early 1970s, but who started it remains unknown. Disney’s slow decline in health, his family-only funeral, and the fact that the public was not notified of his death until after he was buried all added fuel to the legend. It was given new life when it was reported in two unauthorized—and widely discredited—Disney biographies that were published in the late 1980s.
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bsp; THE TRUTH: No documented evidence exists anywhere claiming this to be true. Disney’s daughter Diane said in 1972, “There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that my father, Walt Disney, wished to be frozen. I doubt that my father had ever heard of cryonics.” He wasn’t frozen; in fact, he was cremated and buried in the Forest Hills cemetery in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. Disney’s very private life, along with his cult status, has put him in the same league with Elvis and Marilyn as a target for urban legends.
In 1990 the U.S. government tested 29,000 federal employees for drugs. Cost: $11.7 million. Positive tests: 153. Cost per positive test: $76,470.
GOLF FLUBS
Uncle John was always embarrassed by his golf game…until he read these stories of big-time blunders made by big-time golfers.
Golfer: Bobby Cruickshank
Flub: Cruickshank was leading by two strokes in the final round of the 1934 U.S. Open. At the 11th hole, he looked on in dismay as his drive plopped into a creek. But to his surprise, the ball bounced off a submerged rock and rolled onto the green less than 10 feet from the hole. Cruickshank was so happy he tossed his club in the air and shouted thanks to God. The club came down and hit him in the head, knocking him flat on the ground. He got up after a few moments, but never quite recovered. He finished third.
Golfer: Gary Player
Flub: Player was in the lead at Huddersfield, England, in 1955, but on the final hole, he needed a par four to win. His second shot landed near the green, a few inches from a stone wall. Because there was no room for a backswing and he didn’t want to waste a stroke knocking the ball clear of the wall, Player decided to ricochet the ball off the wall. It didn’t work out exactly the way he planned. The ball bounced back and hit him in the face. Player was knocked for a loop and was penalized two strokes for “impeding the flight of the ball.” He lost the tournament.
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