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Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader

Page 53

by Bathroom Readers' Institute


  THEORY: Anthropology professor Mark P. Leone, who directed the excavation, speculates that African Americans preferred national brands because the prices were set at the national level instead of by neighborhood grocers. By purchasing these brands, “they could avoid racism at the local grocery store, where shopkeepers might inflate prices or sell them substandard goods,” he explains.

  DISCOVERY: A “multitude” of Lydia Pinkham brand patent-medicine bottles, plus an entire set of gold-trimmed china dishes

  MYSTERY: These items were recovered from an outhouse behind the 19th-century home of a wealthy Michigan family that was excavated by John Ozoga in the 1990s. The bottles were clustered in a single layer, and the china dishes were found right on top of them. Why?

  Cold-blooded fact: It takes 35–60 minks to make a single coat.

  THEORY: The wife had fallen ill at a young age and died. Ozoga speculates that she was treated with the patent medicine. When she died, the family emptied the house of her belongings—including the entire set of china, which they threw down the hole in the outhouse—to avoid catching whatever it was that killed her.

  * * *

  WORDPLAY

  How confusing is English to learn? Try on these sentences for size.

  1. We have to polish the Polish furniture.

  2. How can he lead if he can’t get the lead out?

  3. A skilled farmer sure can produce a lot of produce.

  4. The dump was so full it had to refuse refuse.

  5. The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

  6. No time like the present to present the present.

  7. A small-mouthed bass was painted on the big bass drum.

  8. The white dove dove down into Dover.

  9. I spent all of last evening evening out the pile.

  10. That poor invalid, his insurance is invalid.

  11. The bandage was wound around the wound.

  12. They were much too close to the door to close it.

  13. That buck sure does some odd things around the does.

  14. The absent-minded sewer fell down into the sewer.

  15. You sow! You’ll reap what you sow!

  16. The wind was way too strong to wind the sail.

  17. After a number of injections, my jaw finally got number.

  18. If you don’t object to the object, I would like to subject the subject to a series of subjective objectives.

  Worldwide, Christmas has been celebrated on 135 different days of the year.

  INTREPID: MASTER SPY

  Ever heard of William Stephenson? He was an inventor, industrialist, and the father of modern espionage. And if it hadn’t been for him, the Germans might have won World War II. Here’s the story of one of the most important—and least-known—men of the 20th century.

  INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY

  Although he’s not a household name, historians call William Stephenson the “single most important man in the war to defeat Hitler’s Third Reich.”

  But he was reclusive. Never one to seek the public eye, Stephenson preferred to remain behind the scenes and let others take the glory. For this reason, many of the details of his life remain shrouded, and history books tend to contradict each other about his role. The following are factual (probably), agreed-upon (mostly) accounts of his life and work.

  Early years. On January 11, 1896, William Samuel Clouston Stanger (changed to Stephenson a few years later) was born in the bleak prairie town of Winnipeg, Manitoba. From an early age, it was apparent to all around him that he was no ordinary child. He taught himself Morse code, commercial cryptography (the system of sending coded telegrams), and demonstrated a photographic memory. Stephenson’s school principal described him as a boy with a “strong sense of duty and high powers of concentration.”

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  In August 1914, following the outbreak of World War I, that sense of duty prompted him to enlist with the Royal Canadian Engineers, who shipped him off to France. There, Stephenson was injured in a gas attack, and sent to England as an invalid labeled “disabled for life.” But within a year he recovered and, although unfit to return to the trenches, he was equally unwilling to settle for a desk job.

  So Stephenson joined the Royal Flying Corps, returned to France, and became one of World War I’s most decorated fighter pilots, shooting down 26 enemy planes.

  In 1918 Sergeant Stephenson’s luck seemingly ran out when he was accidentally shot down by his own side in hostile territory. He was captured and sent to Holzminden Camp in Germany. But instead of letting imprisonment break him, the opportunistic young man turned it into a business venture: he stole items from the guards and traded them to other POWs in return for favors.

  Better bring a map: There are 412 doors in the White House.

  One of the items Stephenson lifted was a hand-held can opener. After determining that it had only been patented in Germany, Austria, and Turkey, he escaped from the prison camp—with the can opener. By 1919 he was back home in Winnipeg, where he patented the clamp-style can opener, calling it Kleen Kut. It’s still in use today.

  In 1922 he invented a device that improved the way photographs were sent over telephone lines (this device would later lead to the invention of television). Stephenson patented the wireless photography process and became a millionaire before he was 30.

  THE MAKING OF A SPY

  Although he never planned to work in military intelligence, all of Stephenson’s experiences pushed him in that direction. While teaching math and science at the University of Manitoba in the early 1920s, he was approached by a top-ranking British officer and invited to head up a team of cryptanalysts—people who analyze codes. Stephenson immediately left for England.

  During his 19-year stay, he became friends with many powerful and influential people, including the authors George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, the nabob of Bhopal, the Aga Khan, and actress Greta Garbo. But Stephenson’s most important friendship was with Winston Churchill, a Conservative member of Parliament who was not in the good graces of the ruling Labour Party. Churchill and Stephenson shared an interest in technology and espionage; and both feared the rise of Nazi Germany.

  CHATTING WITH THE ENEMY

  Stephenson’s first dealings with the Nazis came in 1934 when an aircraft built by a company in which Stephenson was an investor, General Aircraft, won the King’s Cup air race, the premier flying event of the 1930s. The plane caught the attention of some German military officials, who started a dialogue with Stephenson. To the Germans, Stephenson was nothing more than a rich private citizen (he owned a cement company, a steel manufacturing plant, a movie studio, and real estate). But Stephenson took the opportunity to listen in on the Nazis.

  Montpelier, Vermont, is the only state capital without a McDonald’s.

  What he learned terrified him: the Germans, with Chancellor Adolf Hitler in charge, were building military aircraft at an alarming rate—positioning themselves for something big…really big. Stephenson reported his findings to Churchill, who in turn reported them to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain. The warnings were ignored at first, but when Stephenson’s claims were later verified, England began to prepare for war. Those reports also put Churchill back in the favor of Parliament, paving the way for his historic reign as prime minister.

  And always forward-thinking, Stephenson made a bold recommendation, one that would have changed history but was rejected by the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. He proposed that British agents assassinate Hitler while they still had the chance. Halifax didn’t see what Stephenson saw—he preferred to take a diplomatic approach.

  THE SECOND WORLD WAR

  As predicted, Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Churchill was elected prime minister the following year, and one of his first acts was to appoint Stephenson station chief for the British Secret Service (SIS) in New York City. Why New York? Because in 1940, that’s where Stephenson saw the greatest need. Britain’s ambassador had reported that
9 out of every 10 Americans were determined to keep the United States out of the war. The Britons needed the Americans, so Stephenson used covert tactics to change their minds.

  • He furnished the media with news bulletins and prepared scripts that spoke of Hitler’s brutality.

  • He worked to break up the American isolationist groups that had been growing in numbers since the first world war. One such group, led by Senator Gerald Nye, held a rally in Boston in September 1941. Thousands of pamphlets created by Stephenson’s organization were handed out, accusing Nye of being a German sympathizer.

  • After a speech by another isolationist, Congressman Hamilton Fish, Fish received a card that said, “Der Führer thanks you for your loyalty,” and was secretly photographed while holding it. The photographs were then handed out to his supporters.

  Dog with the best eyesight: the greyhound.

  • An isolationist rally was to be held at Madison Square Garden, but Stephenson printed up hundreds of phony tickets with the wrong date to ensure a low turnout.

  INTREPID AND CAMP X

  If all that didn’t change the Americans’ minds, the invasion of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 surely did. With war declared, both Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt knew that solid intelligence would be key to winning the war. To that end, they assigned Stephenson the job that he had unknowingly been preparing for his entire life: spy trainer.

  Under the code name “Intrepid” and the cover “Passport Control Officer,” Stephenson ran Camp X, a secret facility somewhere near Toronto, Ontario. Camp X was a top-secret training ground where operatives were taught unconventional warfare techniques: how to kill with their bare hands; make lethal weapons out of household items; and blow up industrial installations. Others were trained in lock picking, safe blowing, infiltration, explosives, listening devices, and Stephenson’s favorite, codes and ciphers.

  Once their training was complete, agents were flown into occupied Europe on “moon planes” (plywood aircraft painted dull black to be nearly invisible at night), to conduct sabotage and spy operations. It was a perilous assignment—many agents did not return alive. But they were able to perform some of the war’s most crucial covert missions, including the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal German commander who ruled Czechoslovakia.

  ENIGMA

  But nothing Stephenson did was more important to the Allied war effort than his assistance in cracking the “Enigma” code, Germany’s primary method of transmitting secret messages. An Enigma machine looked like an ordinary typewriter; an operator would type a message, then an internal set of rotors would translate the message into code. This code would be transmitted to another operator, who would use a corresponding Enigma machine to decipher it. Because the Nazis believed that Enigma was impossible to crack, they made widespread use of it, and Stephenson saw this reliance as their greatest weakness. Crack Enigma and the Germans would be helpless. When Polish agents stole an Enigma machine from a German convoy, they sent it straight to Intrepid at Camp X.

  According to experts, many dinosaurs lived to be 100 years old.

  ENTER CYNTHIA

  Stephenson teamed up with Elizabeth Thorpe, a beautiful agent who went by the code name “Cynthia.” To crack Enigma, they needed to intercept a coded message and then see that same message after it came out of an Enigma machine. So Stephenson instructed Thorpe to seduce some high-ranking diplomats who had received messages. Through a combination of guile and feminine prowess, Thorpe acquired a set of codebooks from her unsuspecting lovers. These codebooks unlocked the secrets of Enigma and helped turn the war against Germany in favor of the Allies.

  Stephenson and his agents had many other covert successes during the war, including rescuing Niels Bohr, a leading atomic researcher in German-occupied Denmark. Had the Germans gotten to Bohr, they may have had the A-bomb first. But thanks to the rescue, Bohr was able to work on the Manhattan Project and help the United States build the weapon that would end the war.

  INTREPID’S LEGACY

  For his efforts, Stephenson received a knighthood from the British and the Presidential Medal of Merit from the Americans (the first non-American to be given one). Ironically, he did not receive recognition from his native Canada until Prime Minister Joe Clark presented him with the Companion of the Order of Canada in 1980. Sir William died in Bermuda in 1989 at 93 years old, outside of the public eye, just the way he liked it.

  But Intrepid’s legacy goes even deeper. An aide to the chief of British Naval Intelligence during World War II, a young man named Ian Fleming, had the opportunity to observe Intrepid in action and was very taken with him. After the war, they became friends. While both were living in Jamaica, Stephenson would recount spy tales to his friend. That’s when Fleming started writing a book about a spy called James Bond. Many of Agent 007’s characteristics—his suaveness, brilliance, and slight cockiness—were lifted straight from Stephenson. In fact, Fleming described his secret agent as a “highly romanticized version of the true spy—and Bill Stephenson was the real thing.”

  According to criminal law: Only 3 people are necessary for a disturbance to be called a riot.

  BIRTH OF THE HELICOPTER

  It can fly almost anywhere in almost any kind of weather. It can hover like a bee or speed as fast as a falcon. But it took more than 2,000 years to figure out how to make it work.

  AMARVELOUS TOY

  The desire to fly has inspired inventors for thousands of years. Most of them designed winged aircraft that imitated the flight of birds. But a few put their energies into creating a vertical flying machine, known today as the helicopter.

  The Chinese invented one around 400 B.C. It was just a stick with feathers tied to one end like a bouquet, but when the stick was spun quickly between the hands and let go, it flew up in the air. This ancient toy is the first known example of a vertical flying machine.

  So where did the Chinese get the idea for their toy? Most likely from watching seeds of the maple tree flutter to the ground. The maple seed has a single leaf attached to it, which acts as a rotating wing. When the seed drops off the tree, the wind spins the leaf like a propeller, thus carrying the seed far from the tree.

  INTO THE AIR, JUNIOR BIRD MEN

  About 2,000 years later, in 1754, Mikhail Lomonosov of Russia launched a large, spring-powered model resembling the Chinese toy. It was reported to have “flown freely and to a high altitude.” More importantly, it proved that vertical flight was truly possible. All that was needed was the right engine.

  Englishman Horatio Phillips thought the steam engine might be the solution. In 1840 he built the first vertical flight machine to be powered by an engine. His model aircraft weighed in at 10 kilograms (22 pounds) but it was still a toy. He discovered that the steam engine was much too heavy to be used in a full-scale machine.

  Ponton d’Amecourt of France also made some steam-powered models in the 1860s but he’s remembered more for the name he gave his machines than the machines themselves. He combined the Greek word heliko (spiral) with pteron (wing) to create the word hélicoptère.

  Travel trivia: The Duchess of Windsor took 186 trunks and 83 suitcases on her honeymoon.

  GENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES

  When the combustion engine hit the scene in the late 1800s, piloted vertical flight became possible. The breakthrough year was 1907. In Douai, France, brothers Charles and Louis Breguet built the first helicopter to lift a person up in the air. They only got a few inches off the ground, but they were flying!

  That same year another Frenchman, Paul Cornu, flew his version of the helicopter to a height of almost six feet. His double-rotored craft looked like a pair of room fans mounted horizontally at each end of a giant bicycle, with a lawnmower-sized engine behind the seat. The craft was so unstable that it had to be tethered with sticks, held by men on the ground.

  SPIN DOCTORS

  Torque. They had the right engine, but there were new obstacles. One was the problem of torque. That’s the t
endency of the spinning rotor to make the body of the aircraft turn in the opposite direction. Early choppers would spin up and around like insane tops. But a Russian engineer named Boris Yuriev came up with the solution in 1911. He suggested adding a vertical tail rotor off the rear of the fuselage to counter the unwanted spinning. He built one in 1912, and it worked, sort of: it didn’t spin—but it didn’t fly either—it lacked a powerful enough engine. Though it would need refining, Yuriev had solved the problem of torque.

  Dissymetrical lift. When a helicopter is moving forward, one side of the rotating blades is advancing into the wind, and the other side is going backwards, away from the wind. The advancing side creates more lift, which caused the early helicopters to flip over during forward flight.

  Spaniard Juan de la Cierva solved this problem. He was working on a helicopter-airplane hybrid called an autogyro when he came up with the concept of the “articulated blade.” This blade was attached to the rotor with a flexible hinge. Called “flapping,” this allowed the advancing blade to lift slightly, decreasing lift on one side, thus balancing the opposing forces. And it worked. He made his first successful flight in 1923. Ironically, the technology would be used for helicopters, and the autogyro never “took off.”

  At the same time great advances were being made on the swash-plate, another very important piece of the puzzle. The swashplate was a system of adjustable rods and plates that allowed the pilot to control the angle of the blades—both simultaneously and individually. Simultaneous adjustment, called collective control, makes the chopper go up or down. Individual adjustment, called cyclic control, makes the helicopter go forward, backward, right or left. Now to put all the pieces together.

  According to Middle Eastern tradition, the original forbidden fruit was…a banana.

 

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