Then in 1861 the Civil War broke out, creating a sudden and urgent need for food that could accompany soldiers into battle without spoiling. Union soldiers were issued canned rations…and Warner’s bayonet-style can openers. Canned food became so popular with soldiers that after the war, more and more canned goods appeared on market shelves. But people still needed an easier way to open the cans.
Connecticut inventor William Lyman had the answer, and in 1870 patented his “cutting wheel” can opener, a crank-operated gadget that held a circular metal wheel that could cut through can tops. And since then not much has changed. In 1925 the Star Can Company of San Francisco added a serrated wheel to hold the can and rotate it against the cutting wheel. The electric can opener was introduced in 1931. But amazingly, even the most modern versions of the can opener still look and work pretty much like the one Lyman invented…more than 130 years ago.
DRINKING STRAW
Marvin Stone liked mint juleps. Back in the 1880s, every day after putting in his time manufacturing paper cigarette holders in his Washington, D.C., factory, Stone would stop by the same tavern and order a mint julep—a concoction of bourbon, mint, sugar, and water, served over ice. Keeping the drink chilled was important (warm mint juleps tend to lose some of their minty tang), so mint julep fans would avoid touching the glass with their warm hands. Instead, they sipped the drink through a natural hollow piece of wheat straw.
Stone didn’t like the grassy taste the wheat straw imparted to his favorite drink. He also didn’t like the way the straw would get dusty and start to crack as it was used repeatedly. There had to be a better way. One day, as he watched his cigarette holders being wound out of paper, he had an inspiration. Why not make an artificial straw by winding thin strips of paper around a cylinder?
Stephen King was 19 years old when his first story was published.
He made a prototype in 1888, winding a continuous strip of paper around a pencil and fastening it with dabs of glue. It worked. Stone made several drinking straws for his own use and asked his favorite bartender to stash them behind the counter. When other customers noticed Stone’s invention, they wanted their own, so Stone decided to mass-produce it.
Lemonade was a popular drink in the late 19th century, and Stone reasoned that people might like using straws for lemonade as well as for mint juleps. He fashioned an eight-and-a-half-inch paper straw out of wax-coated manila paper (to resist sogginess) and set the diameter just wide enough to allow lemon seeds to pass through without clogging the straws. By 1890 the Stone Cigarette Holder Factory was producing more drinking straws than cigarette holders.
Most straws today are made of plastic, not paper. But the winding technique Stone invented lives on: most cardboard tubes (like the one at the center of a toilet paper roll) are still made in the same way that Stone wound his first straw. Straws themselves have undergone an evolution: there are straws of colored plastic, with flexible shapes, loop-the-loops, and even flavored straws. But they still do the same basic job: getting liquid into your mouth, fast and cold.
* * *
INSPECTOR GADGET?
Have you ever been snooping with your binoculars, only to have your arms get tired just when you’re sure something really important is about to happen? If so, U.S. Patent #5,131,093—the Bino Cap—may be just the invention for you. It’s a foldable, lightweight combination binoculars/baseball cap. Just put it on and snoop away; your arms are free to take notes, stir your coffee, or record observations into your voice-activated digital recorder. (Despite the fact that it’s been patented, no word on whether the device is actually available yet.)
Radar was used for the first time in the battle of Britain in 1940.
EATIN’ THE TIN SANDWICH
The history of the harmonica will take you to China, Africa, Europe, the Mississippi Delta, and beyond…
BLOWING IN THE WIND
When musicians like Bob Dylan and John Lennon became famous in the 1960s, they did it with a little help from the harmonica. And they gave the harmonica a boost, too. Sales of the tiny instrument skyrocketed when folksingers and rock musicians brought it back into the limelight. But it wasn’t the first time the “harp” became a sensation.
From the 1920s until the 1940s, the harmonica was one of the most popular instruments in the country. The biggest blues, jazz, country, and hillbilly bands—and even theater companies—had harmonica players as part of their acts. Harmonica classes became a regular part of curriculums in many public schools. By the 1930s, the German company M. Hohner, the biggest maker of harmonicas worldwide, was selling over 25 million a year.
Where did the easy-to-carry instrument originate? That’s a very old story.
THE SOUND OF OLD SHENG-HAI
Most musicologists agree that the earliest predecessor to the harmonica was developed in China between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. It was a three-foot-long instrument made of bamboo pipes called the sheng, which means “sublime voice.” Although neither the sheng nor its ancient sisters, the naw, the yu, and the ho, looked anything like a harmonica, they all had one important feature in common: free reeds.
A reed is a thin strip of cane, wood, plastic, or metal that vibrates when air passes over it. A “free reed” instrument, like the accordion or harmonica, produces sound from a reed vibrating inside a chamber—the vibrating reed produces a single note and doesn’t touch anything else.
“Fixed reed” instruments, like the clarinet and the saxophone, use a reed that vibrates against some other part of the instrument. On the clarinet or sax, it’s the mouthpiece, which is attached to a tube with holes in it. Cover the holes and you change the pitch.
In colonial America, tobacco was legal tender in several Southern colonies.
The sheng had multiple free reeds set inside bamboo tubes, which allowed chords (multiple notes that sound good together) to be played. For thousands of years, sheng and similar instruments were played all over China and Southeast Asia.
FREEING THE PITCH
Fixed-reed instruments had been played in Europe for centuries (and some say that even those were introduced from Asia), but free-reeds had not. In 1776 French Jesuit missionary Pierre Amiot sent several shengs from China to Paris—and people who heard them loved them. Within a few years European instrument makers were building their own free reed devices, making instruments such as the harmonium and the reed organ.
In 1821, a 16-year-old named Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann was experimenting with different ways to combine pitch pipes in order to create a new instrument. He soldered together 15 pipes of different pitches, similar to the sheng and, without knowing it, made the next big step toward the modern harmonica.
THE INS AND OUTS
Buschmann’s harmonica, known as the aura, was an immediate hit, and soon other instrument makers began experimenting with the design. In 1825 a man named Richter (his first name is unknown) came up with the idea of a 10-hole, 20-note configuration, one row of reeds activated by inhaling, the other by exhaling.
Richter arranged the notes with the common person in mind: no matter where the mouth is placed, it would always play notes that were in harmony—that sounded good—together, whether inhaling or exhaling. That’s why the instrument is called a “harmony-ca”—it’s always in harmony. Richter’s three-octave model has been changed little since. (Pretty impressive when you consider that a grand piano has an eight-octave range, but weighs about 1,000 pounds—4,000 times as much as a harmonica.)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt once owned a Christmas tree farm.
HARMONIC CONVERGENCE
In 1857 Matthias Hohner, a clockmaker from Trössingen, Germany, visited a harmonica maker in Vienna, Austria, and decided to make his own instruments. He started making them in his kitchen with the help of his family and sold 650 harmonicas the first year. In 1862 relatives in the United States urged him to export some of the instruments. He did, and by 1887 was producing more than a million harmonicas a year, with sales across Europe and the Unite
d States.
BLEND IT LIKE HOHNER
One of the things that helped make the harmonica so successful was its musical flexibility. It could play romping Biergarten music, plaintive European folk songs, and even complex classical music. And it was small and inexpensive, so even poor people could afford one. By the late 1800s, African Americans in the southeast, who had their own musical traditions developed over thousands of years, were inventing a new kind of music: the blues. And the “harp” would be part of it. The trademark “bending” of the notes—using air direction and pressure to slide between notes—would become the trademark sound of the blues. The popularity of the music would soon influence other new styles of American music—jug band, Dixieland, jazz, and swing—and would help carry the harmonica to even greater popularity.
THE GOLDEN YEARS
The 1920s began the first golden age for the harmonica. Two new technologies were sweeping the country: radio and recording. That meant that people could become national stars relatively quickly—and so could the instruments they played: Vernon Dalhart’s 1925 recording “Wreck of the Old 97,” with Dalhart singing and playing harmonica, became country music’s first million-seller.
By the end of the 1920s, hundreds of artists were making recordings and many of them featured the harmonica. And it wasn’t just for accompaniment: all-harmonica bands became hot tickets. Then, in the late 1930s, a musical virtuoso named Larry Adler gave it another boost: Adler played classical and jazz—as a harmonica soloist. How popular was he? From the 1940s until he died in 2001, he regularly played with the biggest stars of the day: Jack Benny, George Gershwin, Billie Holiday and later, Sting and Elton John.
There are as many molecules in 1 teaspoon of water as there are teaspoons of water in the Atlantic.
ELECTRIFIED
The harmonica went into decline in the 1950s, but bluesmen like Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson kept it alive, creating a modern blues-harp sound that would be carried on by James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite. By the 1960s, the harmonica was back, thanks first to the folk music craze and then to Beatlemania.
Since then, harmonica players like Stevie Wonder, John Mayall, Huey Lewis, Delbert McClinton, Magic Dick (J. Geils Band), Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Charlie McCoy, Mickey Rafael (Willie Nelson’s band), and John Popper (Blues Traveler) continue to show the world what one little instrument can do.
HARMONICA TRIVIA
• Nicknames for the harmonica: the Harp, the Tin Sandwich (Cowboy dialect), the Mississippi Saxophone (Blues lingo), and the Mouth Organ (from the German mundharmonika or mundorgan).
• Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, Coolidge, and Reagan were all harp players of varying ability. Lincoln reportedly wrote a letter to Hohner, telling how he enjoyed playing the harmonica to relax.
• The best-selling record of 1947 was “Peg O’ My Heart” by a harmonica trio called The Harmonicats. After the Harmonicats’ success, the musicians union decided to classify the harmonica as an instrument. Before that they called it a toy.
• On December 16, 1965, astronaut Wally Schirra played Jingle Bells on the harmonica—from Gemini Six, at an altitude of 160 miles above Earth.
• In 1986 the M. Hohner Company sold their one billionth harmonica.
• Currently, the most expensive harmonica in the Hohner catalog is a “Chord 48” (the size of a baseball bat, with hundreds of reeds). Cost: $1,500.
• More expensive, but not in the catalog: the solid gold, gemencrusted model that Hohner presented to Pope Pius XI in the 1930s.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote an essay on the possibility of waterskiing.
Q & A: ASK THE EXPERTS
More random questions, with answers from the nation’s top trivia experts.
ABALANCED DIET
Q: What do mosquitoes eat when people or other warm-blooded animals aren’t around?
A: “Your first mistake is assuming that all mosquitoes bite people or other warm-blooded animals. Fact is, a large number of the world’s roughly 2,000 mosquito species prefer birds, while others dine on cold-blooded critters, such as frogs. Your second mistake (a common one) is assuming that blood is a mosquito’s food source. Actually, they eat good old-fashioned carbohydrates, found in fruits, grasses, and the nectar of flowers. So why do mosquitoes bite animals? Females need the protein and amino acids found in blood in order to form their eggs. Males have no need for blood, so they don’t bite people.” (From The Wild File, by Brad Wetzler)
PAYING WITH THE BAND
Q: How do the magnetic strips on credit cards work?
A: “The magnetic strips on the backs of credit cards consist of tiny particles of iron-based ferric oxide. A coating of these particles is bonded to a thin plastic base. They can be magnetized in a northern or southern direction, corresponding to the ones and zeros of binary computer programming. The tape that holds the magnetized particles is similar to cassette recording tape.
“Like recording tape, the magnetic strip will have tracks, but the tracks don’t play music—they contain information such as a valid card number, expiration date, credit limit, and whether that limit has been reached.” (From Popular Science magazine)
THE OUTER LIMITS
Q:Does the fourth spatial dimension really exist?
A: “That depends on what you mean by ‘space.’ There are only three dimensions to our everyday, commonsense kind of ‘space,’ the ‘space’ we can perceive and move in. But physicists have developed persuasive theories using an extra six spatial dimensions. These higher dimensions are curled up into tiny circles, or similar closed surfaces. This curling up of dimensions is like our observing, say, a piece of string from a distance and seeing it as a line, then moving closer and observing that it actually has an extra, circular dimension. If we could observe any point (say a subatomic particle) at a large enough magnification, we would similarly see that it is not a point, but has further dimensions in unexplored directions.” (From The Best Ever Queries, by Joseph Harker)
Marine turtles rid their bodies of excess salt by weeping.
THE VISION THING
Q: How do antifogging treatments for mirrors and eyeglasses work?
A: “They force the tiny droplets of water that make up fog to merge into a transparent sheet. An antifogging agent is sprayed on as liquid, and when it dries, it forms a clear film. Normally, water beads up, but with the film, the beads run together. The water is still there, but you can see through it. Such agents are called surfactants—chemicals that lower the surface tension of the liquid with which they are in contact, in this case water.
“A low-cost emergency substitute is potato juice. In research on land mine removal, potato juice was tested for use in poor countries to keep blast-protection visors from fogging up. It performed as well as some brand-name products.” (From The N.Y. Times Second Book of Science Questions and Answers, by Claiborne Ray)
MAKES CENTS
Q:Why do dimes, quarters, and half-dollars have notched edges, while pennies and nickels do not?
A: “The U.S. Mint began putting notches on gold and silver coins to discourage people from shaving small quantities of the precious metals off the edges. At one point the shaving problem was so bad that merchants refused to accept coins without weighing them to determine their true value. Notching corrected the problem since any attempt to shave a notched coin could be easily detected.
“Dimes, quarters, and half-dollars were notched because they contained silver. There was no need to notch pennies and nickels—the metals they contained were not valuable enough to make shaving worth the effort.” (From Ever Wonder Why?, by Douglas Smith)
Tough to swallow: Tibetans drink a tea made of salted rancid yak butter.
DEATH ON THE MISSISSIPPI
Few people know about the Sultana, despite the fact that it suffered the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. For some reason, it is almost completely ignored by history books. Here’s the tragic story.
HEADING HOME
The Civil War was finally over. It was April 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered; Abraham Lincoln had been shot; and Confederate president Jefferson Davis had been captured. After four years of bloodshed, the war-torn nation was ready to start the process of healing and rebuilding. The first order of business was to get the weary troops home.
Captured Union soldiers were being released from Confederate prison camps. Thousands amassed along the Mississippi River seeking passage on one of the many steamships making their way upriver to the north.
One such riverboat was the Sultana, a state-of-the-art side-wheeler that had been built for transporting cotton. But now her cargo was people. By law, she was allowed to carry 376 passengers and a crew of 85, and the ship’s captain and owner, J. C. Mason, had a reputation as a careful river pilot. But in the end, the money he stood to make from the Union government for transporting extra troops was too tempting to pass up: $5 for each enlisted man and $10 per officer.
A SETUP FOR DISASTER
The Sultana left New Orleans on April 21 carrying a small number of passengers, about 100, and headed north. Each time she stopped, though, the ship took on more troops. The men who boarded were weak, tired, and homesick. After spending months or even years in brutal prison camps, the only thing they wanted to do was get back to their families.
On April 24, the Sultana made her regular stop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to take on more passengers. Captain Mason docked the ship to find thousands of soldiers waiting there. Under normal circumstances, the ship would have made a brief stop, allowed the prescribed number of passengers to board, and then departed. But one of the ship’s three main steam boilers had sprung a leak and needed to be repaired.
A soda can can hold 90 pounds per square inch of pressure… 3 times as much as a car tire.
Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader Page 45