Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  JUST PLAIN LEONARDO

  Leonardo da Vinci got his last name from the Italian town he was born—Vinci, in Tuscany. “Da” means “from” in Italian, so his full name was “Leonardo from Vinci.” That’s why when you look him up in books, he’s always under the L’s.

  Charles Curtis, who became U.S. vice-president in 1929, was part Kaw Indian.

  PORT-A-FORTRESS

  * * *

  It seems like an impossible feat to build an entire fortress in just a few hours, but no one ever told the Romans that. At the end of every day, they literally took out their portable fortress and rebuilt it!

  At the end of a long day’s march, the Roman infantry soldier had to put off thoughts about a warm fire and good food—first, he had a fortress to build. Once his legion arrived at the site picked out by a scouting party, the soldier shucked his pack, took out his shovel, and his piece of wall (yes, that’s right), and started digging.

  A WELL-OILED MACHINE

  Every soldier knew his job. And since it was the whip or worse for anyone who dared disobey his commander, each soldier hopped to it. First, the soldiers built a large, square-shaped wall of dirt that left behind a moat-shaped hole around the whole thing. Then each man attached his personal piece of wall—lengths of wood lashed together—to the dirt wall. And presto, a fortress, complete with moat (albeit a not very deep one, but it served the purpose).

  INSTANT CITY

  Once the fortress was complete, the soldiers trooped inside to raise a city of tents. But a city can’t be complete without streets. In this case, they were sketched out along a precise military grid. The principal street was called—well, Principal Street (Via Principalis). And all along it were the most important tents, such as headquarters and the supply tents.

  Tucked away on the rear streets you’d find the hospital and the reserves, also called the “extraordinarii,” which was made up of the general’s bodyguards and hostages from cities that Rome had conquered. Camp followers (including the officers’ servants and slaves, doctors, and even merchants who ran a kind of traveling market) had their places, too. It was just like being in the same fortress every night, except for the daily change in scenery.

  CAMP SWEET CAMP

  Before the infantry soldier put up his own tent he had to raise the tents of all the commanders and support personnel, which included carpenters, engineers to operate the catapults and other siege engines, sappers (the guys who had to dig under walls during sieges—hey, somebody had to do it), and various other laborers.

  Although King John signed the Magna Carta, he had Pope Innocent annul it.

  DON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP

  Once that was done, the work was still far from complete. Some of the soldiers could hit the hay, but there was always guard duty, not to mention chores like foraging for food, gathering wood, and hauling water—that still had to be done at all hours of the day and night. And the lowly infantry were just the guys to do it.

  SOUP’S ON!

  Trumpets signaled when it was time to get up, time to go to bed, time to change the guard-watch—you get the idea. Oh, and time to eat. Luckily most of them were used to their normal fare, which consisted of bread and sour wine. That’s it.

  UP THROUGH THE RANKS, AND DOWN

  Every morning, all the solders reported to their centurion, all the centurions reported to their tribunes, and all the tribunes reported to the consuls, who doled out the orders. Then, the entire process reversed itself. Nothing was done unless someone in charge commanded it. There was a procedure for everything, and it was followed to the letter, every time.

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  When it was time to break camp, the trumpet sounded with yet another signal. The troops scurried to fold away the tents and pack everything up. At a second signal, they loaded the tents, wall sections, and baggage onto themselves and the horses and mules. Then, in strict military fashion, they set fire to what was left of the camp. The last thing that they wanted was someone else using a camp they’d so effectively built. At a third signal, they lined up into formation, unit by unit. After a rallying cry to boost morale, they marched away, only to repeat the entire process that night.

  WORTH THE TROUBLE?

  Conquering the world was a Roman talent second only to their ability to organize. When they combined the two with their portable fortress, they were ready for anything. Add to this their practice of always seizing the initiative, and they became well nigh invincible.

  Winston Churchill wrote much of Edward VIII’s famous abdication speech.

  PEDDLING PRICEY PETALS

  * * *

  When the tulip took on the sweet smell of success.

  Think the Internet stock rally of the late 90s was unique? Though it may have seemed odd when investors paid high prices for stock in companies that never turned a profit, the Dot-Com craze was only the latest in the history of risky speculative investments. The Dutch could have told new investors a thing or two about stock market crashes.

  WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD

  Colorful tulips are available in just about any garden store for around $2 a bulb, with rarer varieties selling for perhaps $10 apiece. It’s hard to believe that this common flower was once valued more highly than gold. Or that 17th century Dutch stock traders indulged in tulip trading and caused a market crash.

  POTTED SHOW-OFFS

  The tulip craze began in the early 1600s, when tulips, particularly rare ones, became a status symbol in Holland. Moneyed society types showed off their rare Admiral Leifken or Semper Augustus varieties to dinner guests as a way of flaunting wealth. Imitating the wealthy, middle-class tulip fanciers snatched up tulip bulbs.

  DIM BULBS TRADE IN LONDON

  What started out as price inflation due to ravenous demand for a short supply, soon turned to stock trading. Tulip bulbs were listed on stock exchanges in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, and eventually Paris and London. At first, the traders were Dutch citizens going after valuable bulbs; later foreigners joined in the game. Investors speculated wildly on the rarest varieties of tulips. The valuation of tulip bulbs soared. Crop “futures” were bought and sold, and merchants abandoned their businesses to grow tulips. In 1635, a man offered 12 acres of downtown property for a single tulip bulb of the rare Semper Augustus variety. Speculators mortgaged homes and businesses to buy bulbs to resell, while others offered up to $20,000 for rare varieties. A rare tulip bulb was said to be a suitable dowry for a bride.

  Benjamin Harrison, who left office in 1893, was the last bearded U.S. president.

  GETTING BACK TO THEIR ROOTS

  But the bottom dropped out of the market in 1637, when a consortium of bulb merchants couldn’t sell their bulbs for the usual inflated prices. Stock prices slid down, since the tulips were worth only what someone would pay for them. Thousands of Dutch merchants, many of whom had spent their life savings on the bulbs, were reduced to begging in less than two months. The Dutch love affair with tulips continued on undiminished, but the whole debacle left scars on the Dutch economy for decades.

  THE VAST VASELAND

  As Internet stock traders watch their profits evaporate, you might do well to remember the lowly tulip. Then if someone gives you a hot stock tip on an unproven business you can tell them you’re not a blooming idiot.

  THE DEVIL WITH HORSESHOES

  Step on a rusty horseshoe nail and your reward is a tetanus shot. So why are horseshoes lucky? The pagans found horseshoes lucky because they were made of iron, a sacred metal of great power. The Norse god of war, Thor, wielded an iron hammer. The Greeks thought the horseshoe had a lucky shape because it resembled a new moon, a sign of fertility. The shape was considered lucky in the Middle Ages, too. Medieval church doors were sometimes shaped like a crescent moon. But it was the tenth century legend of blacksmith Dunstan that sealed the lucky fate of horseshoes. When a man came in asking to be shod in horseshoes, quick-witted Dunstan realized that the request was unusual. Then he saw that his customer had
a cloven foot—he was shoeing the devil himself! Dunstan, who later became archbishop of Canterbury, tortured the devil with hot irons and nails until the devil promised that neither he nor any of his demons would enter a building protected by a horseshoe. The horseshoe must be nailed upside down on the building so that its luck doesn’t run out.

  Diana was the first British subject to marry an heir to the throne since 1659.

  OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

  * * *

  How a really nice man came to be associated with a deadly machine, and whose name is even more famous worldwide than TV commercial pioneer Ron Popeil and his Popeil Chop-O-Matic.

  Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin was a kindly man. That’s why, when he rose to make a speech before the French Constituent Assembly in October 1789, he proposed that all executions of criminals be performed by a beheading device—a machine that would chop off a head as quickly as you could say, “lickety-split.”

  THE MAN

  Guillotin had taken this one issue as his life’s work; that people convicted of a capital offense should have the right to a quick and painless form of execution. Up to this point, French commoners were dispatched by hanging. The nobility, of course, died a nobler death—by sword.

  THE MACHINE

  The kinder, gentler beheading machine that Guillotin had in mind was already being used in Italy, England, and Germany. Okay, said the French government, let’s try it. They asked a German piano maker, Tobias Schmidt, to build the prototype, which he did, and which was successfully tested on dead bodies supplied by local French hospitals. The guillotine was ensconced just in time to become the symbol of the French Revolution.

  HIS ‘N’ HERS EXECUTIONS

  His: King Louis XVI

  The French masses were in revolt; their target the nobility. After Louis XVI attempted to escape from France with the rest of the royal family in 1791, he was branded a traitor. So his trial in 1793 was just a formality: the guilty verdict was never in doubt. Because the proceedings (which dragged on for 72 hours) therefore lacked the element of suspense, bored spectators in the gallery ate little snacks and passed the wine and the brandy. Outside, at the local cafes, the rest of the rabble took bets on the outcome of the trial.

  Cats first domesticated humanity around 8000 B.C.

  Louis’ Big Day

  A light rain began to fall in Paris as the portly Louis XVI walked from his prison cell to a large green carriage. A procession that included 1,200 guards made its way to a huge square packed with spectators. His chubbiness, the king, was guided to the guillotine, where stood one Charles Sanson, the city executioner, and a consummate professional whose father had preceded him in the office and whose son was to follow him.

  A Royal Pain in the Neck

  As the heavy blade rushed down between the upright posts, the king’s attendant screamed a terrible scream. The king—have we mentioned his weight problem?–had had one too many French pastries over the years and, as a result, his neck was so fat that his head “did not fall at the first stroke.” The crowd stood in hushed silence, then suddenly rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs or pieces of paper in Louis’ royal blood. (The perfect souvenir of a very important day.)

  Hers: Marie Antoinette

  Even before the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette was the most hated person in France. In songs, poems, and cartoons, her political enemies portrayed the Austrian-born queen as a person with perverse, despicable habits. These included plotting to starve the poor, sending money to Austria (France’s hated arch-rival), and indulging her voracious sexual appetite for both men and women. The failed attempt to flee the country with the king in 1791 only served to fuel the people’s hatred and suspicion of their queen. Whether any of the charges leveled against her were true, it didn’t matter. The fix was in. Her trial in the fall of 1793 was speeded up; she was found guilty and condemned to death.

  The Queen’s Last Outfit

  On a morning in 1793, nine months after Louis’ death, Marie Antoinette dressed herself for the last time. Ever the fashion plate, the queen decked herself out in a white dress, white bonnet, black stockings, and plum-colored high heels. Henri Sanson, the son of the man who had pulled the rope on the King’s guillotine, entered her cell and brutally tied the queen’s hands behind her back. Then, he removed her bonnet, cut off her hair, and stashed it in his pocket, perhaps to keep or sell as a souvenir. Outside, a tumbril—a small cart used to carry political prisoners to the guillotine—was waiting. At the sight of the tumbril, Marie began to tremble and had to have her hands untied so she could relieve herself in the corner of a courtyard wall. But once seated in the cart, she regained her composure. The cart proceeded slowly to the guillotine through a dense crowd. As she climbed to the top of the scaffold, she stumbled and stepped on the executioner’s foot. “Monsieur,” she apologized, “I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.” They were the last words she spoke.

  Cleopatra wasn’t even Egyptian. She was Greek.

  EVERYONE ELSE’S EXECUTIONS

  Nearly 3,000 men and women were guillotined in Paris during the fall and winter of 1793. Another 14,000 executions were carried out in the provinces. Most of the victims were designated “enemies of the people” because their politics didn’t agree with whichever revolutionary party held the balance of power at the time. But in hundreds of other cases, innocent people were hauled off to the guillotine on the flimsiest of excuses, such as the denunciations of jealous or vindictive neighbors. In a few cases, people were guillotined because of clerical and administrative errors.

  Postscripts:

  After Dr. Guillotin’s death in 1814, his children tried to get the guillotine’s name legally changed. When their efforts failed, they changed their own name instead.

  The last execution by guillotine took place not so long ago. Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of murder, was guillotined at Baumetes Prison in Marseilles, France, on September 10, 1977.

  “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”

  G.K. Chesterton

  The airfield from which Charles Lindbergh began his famous trip is a shopping center.

  DEADLY AS MOLASSES IN JANUARY

  * * *

  What was 15 feet high, moved at 35 miles per hour, and killed 21 people in 1919?

  The 50-foot high tank at the Purity Distilling Company of Boston, Massachusetts, was going full-bore. Filled to near-capacity, it contained two million gallons of steam-heated molasses, soon to be gallons of rum and industrial alcohol. Little did the Purity people and the citizens of Boston know the tragic and bizarre disaster in store for them that warm January day.

  THE FIRST SIGNS

  Witnesses later reported hearing a banging and tapping sound coming from the tank. The sounds they heard were the rivets that held the tank together popping free. Next thing anyone knew, the tank burst, sending—did we mention two million gallons?—warm, sticky molasses into the streets of Boston, moving at 35 miles an hour. Which might have been funny if it hadn’t also been carrying huge, jagged sections of the tank with it.

  MOLASSES IN JANUARY

  In an irony only found in truth, this event really did take place during January. Too bad it had to be an unusually warm January day, 43 degrees, well above freezing. If the weather had been more typical, it might have given the soon-to-be victims time to notice the oncoming calamity, maybe pack their things, move their belongings, and get the hell out of there, before the brown wall of molasses reached them.

  THE BLOB

  Moving with a dull, muffled roar, the 15-foot-high wall of brown goo surged and rumbled into Boston’s North End. It crushed trolley cars, swallowed trucks, horses, and carts, and knocked buildings off their foundations.

  AMAZING RESCUE

  The parts of the tank propelled by molasses tore into the supports holding up the Atlantic Avenue elevated train. The steel trestles twisted and snapped and the track col
lapsed to the ground, just as a train was approaching. A quick-witted motorman reacted with enviable cool. He walked to the rear of his train and reversed the engines. The train ground to a halt, saved from the still-surging molasses below.

  Charlemagne’s parents were Pepin the Short and Bertha of the Big Foot.

  STICKY DOOM