Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  In August 2000, women filled the top five political and judicial posts in New Zealand.

  TRAGIC ENDING

  When the British explorers finally reached their destination on January 17th, 1912, they were bitterly disappointed to find the Norwegian flag already there. On the way back, insufficient food and a blizzard took the lives of all five men. Scott’s diary detailed the expedition’s last days. It was found by a search party the following November.

  SNAIL MAIL

  It took the hardy Norwegians 53 days to reach the South Pole. News of their feat, on December 14th, 1911, took three and a half months to reach England, longer than the expedition itself.

  DO YOU BELIEVE IN LUCKY UNDERWEAR?

  In South Texas, underwear made its most courageous stand. In August 1840, Juliet Watts had been married for less than a month to Hugh, the customs collector at the port town of Linnville. One morning in August a large war party of Comanches surprised the town, galloping in on horseback, burning, looting, and murdering. Most of the citizens fled to the water on boats, but the Watts rushed to their house to save Hugh’s gold watch.

  Rampaging Comanches killed Hugh and kidnapped his wife. According to some accounts, they attempted to rape her. They tore off her dress, but were stopped cold by her corset! Frustrated by the labyrinth of hooks and laces, the warriors went back to robbing the town, loading their plunder onto mules. As they left the burning town the Indians took captives with them, including Mrs. Watts.

  A posse went after the Comanches, defeating them at the Battle of Plum Creek. The retreating Indians killed many of their captives but though they’d shot an arrow at Mrs. Watts’ breast, the weapon did not pierce her fully because of her corset! Tightly bound corsets have been criticized for harming the circulation and even the internal organs of their wearers, but cruel fashion saved Mrs. Watts. She lived to remarry—thanks to her secret weapon, her underwear.

  Thomas More, who coined the word “utopia,” was executed by Henry VIII.

  BREAKING THE CODE: CRYPTANALYSIS

  * * *

  It’s harder than it looks, and it looks damned difficult.

  Up until the advent of the Internet, the only people who used codes were armies and bankers and spies. Now they’ve got 128-bit algorithms that encode your purchase of the latest bestselling book or video game, so no one knows what you’re buying. Crack an encoded message sent by spies, and trust me, you were on to something. The Nazis were not purchasing music CDs with their encrypted messages, you know.

  Cryptanalysis is nearly as difficult as cryptology (putting the information into code to begin with). People have been coding information as long as there’s been a reason to hide news from someone, though early methods were almost charmingly simplistic.

  A REALLY SERIOUS HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT

  The Greeks did it by writing messages on a piece of cloth spiraled down a stick of a certain thickness; unraveled, the cloth strip was gibberish (it was all Greek to them). The Romans used letter transposition, shifting all the letters by a certain amount, not unlike you would do for your Lucky Charms Secret Decoder Ring. Although, it would be Julius Caesar and not some fey leprechaun telling you how many letters to click over, and the secret message would be to take Masada rather than to eat more sugary cereal.

  ARABIAN KNOW-HOW

  Serious coding had to wait until the 15th century. The Arabs (who had been caretaking and expanding on Western knowledge while Europe festered in that unfortunate dark age it had going) codified the fundamentals of both cryptology and cryptanalysis. They were the first people to figure out that certain letters (such as vowels) appear with more frequency than others, and that you could crack a simple code based principally on frequency counts of certain letters. I know, you’re thinking, “Duh, who doesn’t know about letter frequency distributions in cryptanalysis?” But remember, this was a simpler time.

  The Marquis de Lafayette was labeled a traitor during the French Revolution.

  YANKEE INGENUITY

  Cryptology in itself probably never won any wars, but cryptanalysis certainly helped to win them, and it was enough of a priority that combatants would often go to desperate measures to crack the enemy’s codes. Take the Confederate army. The Confederate army had such a difficult time cracking the Union’s codes that they actually published encoded Union messages in newspapers to encourage the folks at home to play along. Sort of like a Word Jumble, where the unjumbled message would be Sherman’s request for torches, the better to burn his way from Atlanta to the sea. The Union had no problem cracking Confederate codes, incidentally; the Rebs were using a relatively unsophisticated cipher.

  ULTRA-COOL

  Probably the most famous example of the importance of cryptanalysis comes from the Second World War, and the vaunted British “Ultra” program to crack the German encryption code, known as “Enigma.”

  Spearheaded by the famous mathematician Alan Turing, the Ultra project gave the Allies an immense advantage in terms of knowing what the Germans were up to—even if they couldn’t take advantage of all the information. If Allied forces just happened to show up where the Germans were, the Germans would figure out their code had been broken, you see.

  WHAT BOMBS?

  This made for some torturous maneuverings: The Brits would decrypt the location of a German convoy, for example, and then send out a plane that would “discover” the convoy, after which they would blow it up right pretty. Be that as it may, sometimes sacrifices were made: the British once discovered that the town of Coventry was going to be bombed, and rather than evacuate the town—and risk exposing their knowledge—the bombing was allowed to happen.

  NOT A POLISH JOKE

  A little-known secret about the British Ultra project is that much of the heavy lifting in that effort came not from the British but from the Poles. During the 1930s the Polish government, who had a justifiably dim view of the Germans, assigned Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rózycki, and Henryk Zygalski to crack the Enigma code. They did it the old-fashioned way: first they procured expired Enigma codes and a booklet that explained how to set up an Enigma (“So You Want To Send Secret Messages: A Beginner’s Guide”). Then they built a replica of the Enigma machine. Then they whacked away at the codes and the rewired the Enigma machine until they got actual deciphered messages.

  England’s Stonehenge is 1,500 years older than Rome’s Coliseum.

  HOW TERRIBLY BRITISH

  In 1939, realizing Poland was about to be carved up (they had the Germans’ messages, after all), the Poles set up a secret meeting with the Brits and handed over all their research on Enigma up to that point. The Brits were dumbfounded, to put it mildly. Did they let Rejewski, Rózycki, and Zygalski in on the Ultra project? Of course not. They were foreigners, you see. They had enough problems sharing information with the Americans. (Who, incidentally, were busy cracking a code of their own: “Purple,” an Enigma-like code used by the Japanese. It was no small task—the lead researcher on Purple suffered a total nervous breakdown—but it yielded very positive results. Thanks to cracking Purple, American fighter planes “just happened” to shoot down a plane carrying Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan’s naval forces. He was the guy who suggested attacking Pearl Harbor, you know, so there were probably very few tears shed over what was, in fact, a bald-faced assassination by airplane.)

  DO THE MATH

  It’s not an exaggeration to say that the need to crack the Enigma code expanded human knowledge considerably. Much of this expansion took place in the rarified field of mathematics—by the time of WWII, cryptanalysis was indistinguishable from higher-order math, and today it’s even more so—but other fields also got their share.

  BEATEN TO THE PUNCHCARD

  The first programmable computer was not constructed in the United States after the war as is generally presumed, but in Bletchley Park, home of the Ultra project. The computer, called “Colossus” (because it was), was designed to crack codes quicker than any human could. When yo
u’re at your computer, you’re reading on the spiritual descendent of Colossus—“spiritual” because the machine, secret during the war, was destroyed just as secretly afterward—the Brits were nothing if not paranoid, and by extension, thorough in covering their sneaky little tracks. The world didn’t find out about Enigma or Ultra until the 1970s. At which time, the Argentine air was filled with the sound of former Nazis smacking their foreheads in aggravation.

  At the height of its power, Sparta had 25,000 citizens and 500,000 slaves.

  THE REAL SECRET

  As mighty an intellectual feat as cracking the Enigma and Purple codes were, the tale is also an example of how when it comes down to it, people with big brains often have to rely on people with teeny brains making really dumb mistakes.

  The Enigma code was broken partially because German army soldiers were so confident the code was invincible, that they got sloppy and used simple “initial” codes—a three-letter code at the beginning of a transmission that allowed the guy at the other end to “tune” his machine to receive the message. That’s what allowed the Brits their window of opportunity (The German navy was more circumspect with codes and who sent messages—as a result, the naval codes were cracked years later than the army codes). It’s proof that the biggest problem with any perfect system is the imperfect humans that use it.

  IT’S A SMALL WORLD

  Like a lot of writers before and since, Geoffrey Chaucer had a day job. While working as a clerk in England’s royal household, he came into contact with Philippa, the granddaughter of King Edward III and the daughter of Prince John of Gaunt. Philippa found out that one of Chaucer’s interests was navigation. She was fascinated by the subject and Chaucer taught her everything he knew about it. Later, when she became queen of Portugal, she passed it all on to her son, Henry the Navigator.

  In 1892, Italy raised the minimum age for marriage for girls to 12.

  PROVEN WRONG BY HISTORY: PART I

  * * *

  A collection of ill-conceived comments on the march of technology by people who watched from the sidelines—and should have known better.

  “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

  —Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

  “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”

  —Popular Mechanics, 1949

  “But what . . . is it good for?”

  —Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip

  “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

  —Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

  “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’”

  —Apple Computer, Inc., founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and Hewlett-Packard interested in the personal computer that he and Steve Wozniak created

  “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

  —Bill Gates, 1981

  In 1787 the official U.S. currency was established as the dollar.

  CATCHER, LAWYER, LINGUIST, SPY

  * * *

  Moe Berg was a man of many talents—and many quirks. By all accounts, he was a much better spy than he was a baseball player.

  Morris “Moe” Berg was born in New York City in 1902, the son of Russian immigrants. He graduated from high school with honors and was accepted at Princeton. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, so he eventually got a law degree. But Berg found other professions—such as baseball player, linguist, and spy—much more interesting than law. As a spy, he was sent on an assignment with very high stakes—the outcome of World War II.

  THE SHORTSTOP WHO SPOKE LATIN

  Berg played shortstop for the Princeton baseball team. That’s where it became obvious that he was a different sort of ballplayer: instead of the usual hand signals, Berg communicated with his second baseman in Latin. Moe studied languages at Princeton, including ancient Indian Sanskrit and Egyptian hieroglyphics, as well as the everyday ones. After he graduated in 1923—to his father’s horror—Berg joined the Brooklyn Robins (the team that later became the Brooklyn Dodgers) as a backup catcher. His baseball salary paid for linguistics study at the Sorbonne in Paris and put him through the law program at Columbia University.

  STRIKING OUT IN ANY LANGUAGE

  Moe Berg played for five different major league teams during his 16-year baseball career. When he played for the Washington Senators, he broke an American League record in the 1932–1933 seasons by playing 117 consecutive full games without an error. But his hitting record was so deplorable (his lifetime average was .243) that it inspired the line: “Moe Berg can speak 12 languages, and he can’t hit in any of them.”

  ALL-STAR SPY

  In 1934, an American League all-star team was put together for a tour of Japan. On it were such outstanding players as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig—and the definitely less skillful Moe Berg. Some say Berg was put on the team because he spoke Japanese. He also understood Japan’s culture better than the average American did, which made him very popular with the Japanese.

  The name of the Wright Brothers’ first plane was Bird of Prey.

  JAPANESE MOVIES

  He took advantage of the opportunity to make movies of Tokyo from the rooftop of a hospital building—including the harbor and shipyards, industrial sites, and military installations. Some sources say that Berg was working for U.S. intelligence even then. Others insist that Berg did the filming on his own. There’s a similar disagreement over the value of Berg’s home movies. According to an often-told story, they were used in 1942 to help plan General Jimmy Doolittle’s bombing raids on Japan. Other historians say the pictures were probably of little use.

  THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM LEFT FIELD

  Either way, making those movies steered Berg toward a new career. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) was run by William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, and he thought Moe Berg would make a good spy. After all, Berg spoke a number of languages, he was exceptionally intelligent, and he had a knack for getting people to talk to him. All good spy qualities.

  DROP THAT GUN!

  So when his baseball career was over in 1939, the OSS offered Moe Berg a job. He was somewhat inept at first—he couldn’t even figure out where to carry his gun. He tried to tuck it into his jacket, his belt, and his sock—but it kept falling out. One time, he just had a friend hold it for him. He traveled the world—to Casablanca, Algiers, Rome, Yugoslavia, and Norway—always wearing that traditional spy-wear: the trench coat.

  ASSIGNMENT TO KILL

  In 1944, U.S. scientists were hard at work on the Manhattan Project, the effort to build an atomic bomb before the Germans did. That December, Berg was sent to Zurich, Switzerland, to attend a conference of scientists. His job was to find out how far along the Germans were in building their bomb. And if they were close, to kill Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s leading atomic physicist, right then and there.

  Of Queen Anne’s 18 children, 13 were stillborn. The only one who survived infancy died at 11.

  COOL AS AN ICE-BERG

  Posing as a Swiss physics student and carrying his trusty gun (which he’d finally learned how to carry) and a suicide pill (a cyanide tablet, just in case), Berg listened as Heisenberg gave a lecture on basic physics. Ho-hum: Berg would have to do more digging. Right after the lecture an opportunity presented itself.

  At a dinner party that night, Berg had a chance to chat with Heisenberg. The physicist spilled the beans: he complained that the German project was lagging behind the Allies. He supposedly told Berg, “It’s a shame, Germany has already lost the war.” (Yes!)

 
; WHEW!

  So Berg didn’t have to use his gun or his suicide pill. He cabled the good news to the OSS in Washington; they passed it on to President Roosevelt, who responded with, “My regards to the catcher.”

  THANKS, BUT NO THANKS

  Moe Berg probably did other espionage work for the OSS, and maybe even for the FBI. (It’s top secret, so how are we supposed to know?) He was awarded the Medal of Freedom. But he refused the award, although he said he respected “the spirit in which it was offered.”

  STILL A FAN

  Berg had always had the habit of disappearing without warning and suddenly turning up again. After the war, he apparently became something of a vagabond, but he still went to baseball games as often as he could. He was an entertaining storyteller who sometimes expanded on the facts, which has made it hard for historians to sort out the actual events of his life. When he died in 1972, he left no estate—only the remarkable legend of a man of many abilities and many mysteries.