But that’s not the end of the story. Today, Radnor is connected to Erie by paved freeways instead of rutted dirt roads. There is a legend that some of the bones were lost on the grueling trip home …and the ghost of “Mad Anthony” haunts the freeways, searching for his lost leg.
…declared it legal for women to wear trousers.
WAYNE’S WORLD
• Have you every been to…Wayne City, Illinois; Waynesville, North Carolina; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Wayne, Michigan; Waynesboro, Virginia; Wayne, Waynesburg, or Waynesboro, Pennsylvania; Waynesfield or Waynesville, Ohio; or Wayne Township, New Jersey?
• Did you attend…Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan; Wayne High School in Huber Heights, Ohio; Wayne Middle School in Erie, Pennsylvania; Wayne High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana; Anthony Wayne Middle School in Wayne, New Jersey; or General Wayne Elementary School in Paoli, Pennsylvania?
• Did anyone in your family…perform military service at Fort Wayne in Detroit, Michigan?
• Did you ever…picnic in Anthony Wayne Recreation Area in Harriman State Park, New York, or drive across the Anthony Wayne Suspension Bridge near downtown Toledo, Ohio?
• Have you ever driven on…Anthony Wayne Drive in Detroit, Michigan; Wayne Avenue in Ticonderoga, New York; or Anthony Wayne Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio?
• Did you ever…see a film at the Anthony Wayne Movie Theater in Wayne, Pennsylvania; get your hair cut at the Anthony Wayne Barber Shop in Maumee, Ohio; or fish on the Mad River in Dayton, Ohio?
They’re all named after Mad Anthony Wayne.
MORE MAD-NESS
• In 1930 actor Marion “Duke” Morrison was about to get his first starring role, in director Raoul Walsh’s Western, The Big Trail. But Fox Studios didn’t like the name “Duke Morrison”—it wasn’t American-sounding enough. So Walsh suggested changing it to “Anthony Wayne,” after the general. The film’s producer thought that Anthony Wayne sounded “too Italian,” and that Tony Wayne “sounded like a girl.” So they changed his name to John Wayne.
• According to many pop-culture historians, the comic book character Bruce Wayne—better known as Batman—was named after Scottish patriot Robert the Bruce…and Mad Anthony Wayne.
The world’s smallest park—452 sq. inches—is in Portland, OR. (It was designed for snail racing.)
TOILET TECH
Better living through bathroom technology.
Product: Fresh-Air Breathing Device (a.k.a.Toilet Snorkel) How It Works: The biggest cause of fire-related injury and death isn’t the flames—it’s the smoke. In 1982 William Holmes received a patent for a device designed to access a source of fresh air during fires in high-rise buildings, where help may be slow to arrive. Snake this slender breathing tube down through any toilet and into the water trap, and access fresh air from the sewer line’s vent pipe. At the user end, the breathing tube is connected to a strap-on mask. Good news: The Toilet Snorkel comes with an odor-eating charcoal filter.
Product: No-Flush Urinal
How It Works: In recent years, some states, such as Arizona and California, have required all new toilets to be low-flow, water-conserving models. Waterless Co. of Vista, California, went one step further: They invented a urinal that uses no water at all. The No-Flush uses a glazed, ultrasmooth drain so slick and so narrow that urine is whisked away via gravity. Waterless claims that one of their devices can save 45,000 gallons of water a year.
Product: Intelligence Toilet
How It Works: The Japanese manufacturer Toto has a commode with a computer chip and a built-in urine analyzer. But that’s not all you’ll find in Toto’s integrated bathroom: There’s also a blood-pressure cuff housed in the sink countertop, a scale in front of the counter to weigh the user, and a device above the sink that measures body fat when briefly gripped after washing your hands. All results are recorded automatically on the toilet’s hard drive and sent via the Internet to a home computer, which then dispenses dietary and health recommendations. Cost: $5,230.
Product: Compost Toilet
How It Works: It’s essentially a litter box for people. According to the World Toilet Organization, a trade group based in Singapore, this Chinese toilet is a steel box filled with sawdust. It has a microcomputer that senses when the box has solid waste in it, and a mechanical arm that rotates the sawdust, burying the waste (which the company says can later be used as organic fertilizer). The device stays at a constant temperature of about 120°F, hot enough to make liquid waste evaporate, and has specially formulated low-odor sawdust that needs to be changed only once a year.
Not as special as you think: You share your birthday with at least 9 million other people.
Product: Indipod
How It Works: First there were car phones, then car DVD players. Now there’s a car toilet. Indipod is a small chemical toilet within an inflatable opaque “bubble,” designed to work inside most SUVs. A fan, powered by the car’s cigarette lighter, inflates the tentlike bubble, creating a private bathroom in the back of the car. Chemicals in the toilet break down waste into a “sweet-smelling” liquid housed in a detachable, disposable container. Bonus: The fan noise masks any…um…sounds made inside the bubble. The company’s motto: “Freedom to go wherever you want to go.”
Product: New Plunge
How It Works: This product aims to replace the traditional toilet plunger. New Plunge is a straight rod of flexible plastic that you stick down the drain and twist around until the obstruction is cleared. But wait—there’s more. New Plunge can also be used to prevent toilet clogs: One end of the plastic rod is a dull blade that can be used to “slice and dice” waste into smaller, more easily flushable chunks. What’s more, says the manufacturer, it cleans up easily with toilet paper (“simply run the tissue down the length of New Plunge”) and leaves no toilet residue on the floor.
Product: iCarta
How It Works: Now you can really “go anywhere” with your iPod. The iCarta resembles an ordinary wall-mounted toilet paper dispenser. But while TP comes out the roll on the bottom, the top has an iPod “docking station.” Music comes out two moisture-resistant speakers.
Can you name all five Great Lakes? (Michigan, Huron, Superior, Erie, and Ontario.)
THE ICE AGE
This article isn’t about what you think. It’s about the other ice age—the 19th century, when ice was big business and the iceman delivered right to your door.
COLD COMFORT
Humans have used freezing as a way to preserve food since the days they lived in caves. The practice was probably discovered around 12,000 years ago during the last ice age. By 4,000 years ago, the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia were commonly using ice pits to store food and chill drinks. The Chinese got into it around 1100 B.C. The Egyptian pharaohs had ice shipped from Lebanon. Alexander the Great ordered ditches to be dug at the cave city of Petra and filled with snow so his troops could have chilled wine during the blistering Jordanian summer. In each case, the ice had to be imported from the mountains, and most of it melted along the way, making ice as valuable a commodity as gold. In Persia, Greece, and later Rome, it was a sign of affluence to be able to enjoy icy treats in summer. By the Renaissance, European nobility competed to display the most lavish ice sculptures at their banquets, accompanied by indulgent sherbets and gelati (soft ice cream).
PUT IT ON ICE
The technology of storing ice was simple—dig a pit, line it with some insulating material such as sawdust or straw, cart the snow or ice down from the nearest snowcapped mountain, cover it with more straw, and enjoy it while it lasted. With very few modifications, this is how ice was stored for centuries.
Eventually, people realized that ice lasted longer if it was kept aboveground in an icehouse, usually just a simple roofed pen built of boards and insulated with sand, wood chips, and branches—the first coolers. By the 19th century, sawdust had become the insulator of choice. It would be spread two or three feet deep across the floor of the icehouse. Once the ice blocks were lo
aded in, more sawdust was spread over and around them. If the icehouse was built in the shade, this well-insulated winter ice could easily last into August. Ice harvesting was an equally simple process: Find a frozen lake, get a saw, cut the ice into chunks, load it on a cart, and race like crazy to the nearest icehouse.
In 1892 Italy raised the minimum marrying age for females…to 12.
THE ICEMAN COMETH
Early Americans seemed to have had a particular fixation with ice. One of the first things the colonists at Jamestown did was build pits for the ice they cut from winter ponds. In parts of North America, like Maine, the ice-harvesting season could last until March, which led enterprising New Englanders to try exporting it. Ice harvesting was expensive—every block had to be sawn by hand—but it was also lucrative. A ton of ice was worth hundreds of dollars at a time when most commodities were valued in pennies. The first recorded American ice shipment went from New York to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1799. By 1805, ice harvesting was one of New England’s biggest businesses—and one man dominated that business like a colossus.
Around 1800, Frederic Tudor passed up a chance to go to Harvard in favor of a visit to the Bahamas. While sweating in the islands, it occurred to him that shipping ice from Boston to the Caribbean could be very profitable. At the time, New England produced very little that could be exported. Ships that brought goods into Boston left with empty holds, meaning ship owners made money only in one direction. Even worse, they often had to fill their holds with rocks for ballast on the outward voyage. Ice made a perfect substitute: It was plentiful and it was heavy. Ship owners remained skeptical; people had tried transporting ice over long distances before, and it was a risky proposition.
THE ICE KING
Tudor persisted, and in 1805 he shipped his first load of ice to Martinique. But that and subsequent attempts failed so badly that he wound up in debtor’s prison for a time. Still, he kept at it, experimenting with ways of better insulating his cargo. He introduced the use of cavity walls in his icehouses and ships, which kept the sawdust from getting wet and protected the ice from being soiled by sawdust. His innovations worked: By 1816 the Tudor Ice Company dominated the ice trade to Cuba and the Caribbean.
But ice exports were necessarily limited by the handmade nature of the product. In 1825 Tudor’s employee, Nathaniel Wyeth, harnessed a cutting blade to a team of horses. The “ice plow” tripled Tudor’s ice production. Needing new markets for his now plentiful ice, Tudor began looking west to what would become the greatest ice market of all…India.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden as…
OH, CALCUTTA!
At first, the idea of shipping ice to India was absurd. Calcutta, the Indian port closest to Boston, was 16,000 miles away, and a four-month journey by ship. When Tudor announced his intention to send a shipment to India, people thought he was either joking or out of his mind. He wasn’t. On May 12, 1833, Tudor watched from the pier as his crew loaded 180 tons of winter ice on board the brig Tuscany and set sail for the Orient. Boston wags started taking bets on how big a loss Tudor would sustain this time.
The Tuscany sailed into the Ganges estuary in September. When the ship docked in Calcutta, there were still 100 tons of marketable ice in the hold. For the next 20 years, Calcutta was the most profitable destination for Tudor’s ice ships. By 1840, the Tudor Ice Company had icehouses in Madras, Bombay, and Singapore, and the profits rolled in. Tudor died in 1864, when the ice-cutting business was at its peak.
CLEAR BLUE
By the end of the Civil War, having ice in the United States was no longer a luxury but a fact of everyday middle-class life. The first icebox for home use was sold in 1861; by 1865 two out three homes in Boston had ice delivered to them every day. The expansion of the railroads made the distribution of ice faster and less expensive. Ice companies (and ice wagons) became a fixture in communities across America.
Prices were determined by the purity of the frozen water used. River ice was the least valued because it was often milky. Still-pond ice was best. Blocks of “clear blue” were always in highest demand. Clear-blue ice from Wenham Lake near Boston became world-famous for its exceptional clarity. It was especially popular in London, where at one time no dinner party was considered a success if it didn’t have Wenham Lake ice.
… “a film so funny it was banned in Norway.” (It really was banned there.)
FREEZE-OUT
“Ice famines,” caused by unseasonably warm winter weather, put a cramp in the ice trade in 1889 and 1890, but it remained a lucrative business into the 20th century. Even the invention of artificial refrigeration couldn’t slow it down. Primitive refrigerators had been invented as early as 1748, but they were too slow and too expensive to compete with natural ice. What brought an end to the ice-cutting industry? Pollution. As the Northeast and other centers of North American ice making became more industrialized, the rivers and ponds the ice cutters used became fouled with factory waste. Deliveries were constantly disrupted by the collection of contaminated water. In the meantime, electric refrigerators became cheap enough to deliver the final blow. By the 1920s ice houses had started to disappear from most cities. They hung on in rural areas through the 1930s, but with the end of World War II in 1945, the American Ice Age was history.
* * *
FIRST 20 VIDEOS PLAYED ON MTV
1. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the Buggles
2. “You Better Run,” Pat Benatar
3. “She Won’t Dance,” Rod Stewart
4. “You Better You Bet,” the Who
5. “Little Susie’s on the Up,” PhD
6. “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” Cliff Richard
7. “Brass in Pocket,” the Pretenders
8. “Time Heals,” Todd Rundgren
9. “Take It on the Run,” REO Speedwagon
10. “Rockin’ the Paradise,” Styx
11. “When Things Go Wrong,” Robin Lane and the Chartbusters
12. “History Never Repeats,” Split Enz
13. “Hold on Loosely,” .38 Special
14. “Just Between You and Me,” April Wine
15. “Sailing,” Rod Stewart
16. “Iron Maiden,” Iron Maiden
17. “Keep On Loving You,” REO Speedwagon
18. “Message of Love,” the Pretenders
19. “Mr. Briefcase,” Lee Ritenour
20. “Double Life,” the Cars
First man-made object to reach the moon: Luna 2, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft, in 1959.
WORD ORIGINS
Here are some more of our favorite stories behind words we use every day.
CUE
Meaning: A signal for an actor to speak or do something Origin: “A cue, in its theatrical use, was used in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Pyramus, you begin: when you have spoken your speech, enter into that brake; and so every one according to his cue.’ Many etymologists believe that it was a phonetic spelling of the letter ‘q,’ a marking used by actors in their scripts as an abbreviation of the Italian quando (‘when’).” (From The Story Behind the Word, by Morton S. Freeman)
MARGARITA
Meaning: A popular tequila-based cocktail
Origin: “The margarita was first concocted in 1948 by Dallas socialite Margarita Sames at a Christmas party. Margarita liked to play a poolside game with her guests: She would get behind the bar and concoct several drinks for them to rate. When she mixed together three parts tequila with one part triple sec and one part lime, everyone loved it. Named in her honor, the margarita travelled to Hollywood and then to the rest of the country.” (From Why Do Donuts Have Holes?, by Don Voorhees)
HURRICANE
Meaning: An intense tropical storm with very high winds
Origin: “The Popol Vuh (an ancient Maya holy text) relates how the world began as a watery waste, over which the god Hurakán passed in the form of a mighty wind. As the god of thunder and lightning, Hurakán was greatly feared. The now-exti
nct aborigines of the West Indies, the Taínos, called the evil spirit that brought tropical storms a hurrican. To the Carib Indians the word hyorocan meant ‘devil.’ The Spanish borrowed these names to create the word huracán, which they used to describe the storms they encountered in the New World.” (From From Achilles’ Heel to Zeus’s Shield, by Dale Dibbley)
All U.S. telephones were turned off to honor Alexander Graham Bell during his funeral in 1922.
DUMB CROOKS
More proof that crime doesn’t pay.
KEEP THE CHANGE
“A judge gave Vickey Siles of New Haven, Indiana, just a suspended sentence and probation, ostensibly out of pity for the lousy job she did altering a check from Globe Life and Accident Co. Siles had tried to obliterate the ‘$1.00’ amount of the check by typing ‘$4,000,000.00’ over it, and then attempted to cash it at a neighborhood check-cashing store.”
—Washington Post
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
“Police conducting a roadblock operation in Texas stopped a man for not wearing his seatbelt. During the stop, the police observed three silver pipe-like packages on the floor. The police began to question the man as to whether or not the objects were pipe bombs. That’s when the man blurted out, ‘Man, that ain’t no pipe bomb. That’s cocaine.’”
—lwcbooks.com
IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?
“A thief in Munich, Germany, who stole a woman’s World Cup ticket from her purse in 2006 was caught after he sat down to watch the game…next to the victim’s husband. The unidentified 34-year-old numbskull mugged 42-year-old Eva Standmann while she was en route to the Munich stadium for the game between Brazil and Australia and came across the ticket in her bag. As he sat in what was supposed to be the woman’s seat, he was met by her hubby, 43-year-old Berndt Standmann, who promptly notified stadium security and had the crook arrested.”
Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader Page 43