Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  deliver a broadside

  Heavily armed sailing ships had considerable firepower. They could deliver a broadside, that is, simultaneously discharge all the artillery on one side of the ship, and cause enough damage to blow an enemy out of the water. On land, however,delivering a broadside came to mean delivering a volley of verbal abuse, whereas to “blow out of the water” means to effect a resounding defeat in sports, business, or other competition.

  son of a gun

  The gun deck of square-rigged ships became the source of another common expression. Wives of Royal Navy crewmen occasionally were permitted to go on long voyages with their husbands, and not surprisingly some of them would become pregnant. The only safe place to give birth was behind a canvas shelter rigged up between cannons on the gun deck, so a baby boy born in this way was dubbed a son of a gun, an term that also hinted at a question of who the father was. In any case, the term was adopted in civilian life and it survived long after the British Admiralty outlawed the practice of wives living on board, around 1840.

  From MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Summer 2001 by Christine Ammer.

  Copyright © 2001 by MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History.

  Reprinted by permission of PRIMEDIA Enthusiasts Publications (History Group).

  Spain found so much silver in the New World that the inflation ruined its economy.

  DEATH OF A REVOLUTIONARY

  * * *

  The story of Che Guevara, or. . .

  who was that guy on all those posters?

  Say “revolutionary” and the image is automatic: the uniform, the beret, and the determined, soulful look of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Che was the Elvis of revolutionary struggle for disaffected youth of the 60s and 70s. Even before his death, Che was the ultimate radical. Mao, Lenin, and Castro had sold out the cause to run morally questionable governments. Not Che.

  THE DOCTOR’S CURE

  The Argentinean doctor (Che studied medicine at Buenos Aires University) was Fidel Castro’s second-in-command in the Cuban Revolution. After fighting with Castro from 1956 to 1958 in a seemingly impossible struggle against the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the impossible happened. They won. Che was rewarded with top jobs, including minister of industry, president of the National Bank, and permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. Rather than enjoying life at the top, he gave it up to lead guerrilla wars to help the oppressed.

  WE ALL WANNA CHANGE THE WORLD

  Truth was Guevara was too radical for Castro. Che saw the Cuban takeover as a stop on the road to world revolution, but Castro had a nation to run. When Che attacked the U.S.S.R. for deserting revolutionaries and the U.S. for imperialism, Castro saw Che as trouble. When Guevara wanted to pick up his rifle again and start peasant wars against the imperialists, Castro decided to let him.

  Che’s first target was the Belgian Congo. In 1965 he got Castro to let him lead a small Cuban force in the huge African country. He thought the locals would rise up and join him in a revolution against their Belgian colonial oppressors. The untrained locals melted away when faced with the Belgian mercenaries. The country fell to Mobutu Sese Seko, one of Africa’s most corrupt leaders.

  Portugal was the last country to hold on to its African colonies, losing them in the 1970s.

  GUEVARA REMAINS UNCHANGED

  Guevara returned to Cuba; but the Congo hadn’t discouraged him. He disappeared from Cuba and entered Bolivia with a false passport in the fall of 1966. Once again, Che figured that peasants would rise up against the capitalist oppressors. This time, he was dead wrong. Che’s guerrilla force in Bolivia included Peruvians, Cubans, and Argentineans as well as Bolivians. The government announced that a gang of foreign bandits was roaming the countryside. The peasants’ reaction was simple fear. When Guevara’s men arrived, the locals fled. The revolutionaries became hungry and desperate. Guevara fought on. He’d trained in guerrilla war in Mexico in 1954 with Captain Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and he was a star pupil. In the summer of 1967, his men carried out guerrilla raids against the Bolivian Army and proved they could strike almost at will, even without popular support.

  ENTER THE GREEN BERETS

  Then the Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces got help—from the 8th Special Forces division of U.S. Army Forces. A 16-man team of Green Berets arrived to train and equip a unit of Quechua Indians, the 2nd Rangers Battalion. The Battalion was dedicated to wiping out Guevara’s force—and Guevara. So was an American CIA task force. A Cuban-American CIA officer, Felix Rodriguez, posed as a Bolivian Army officer to witness the kill.

  On October 8, Guevara and his men were surrounded, and after a brief firefight it was all over. Guevara, wounded in the leg, was captured. Bolivian soldiers carried Che on a stretcher to the nearest town. The Bolivian Army announced on the radio that Che had been killed in the battle. Rodriguez went to tell Che he was going to be executed. The noncommissioned officers drew straws, and a Bolivian sergeant shot Guevara dead. Che stood up to die. He defiantly said that he preferred death under the guns of the oppressor. Death guaranteed his fame. If he hadn’t been killed, the Bolivian insurrection might have failed. By shooting him, the Bolivians and CIA turned him into a martyr and a hero. Soon his image was an inspiration to young people worldwide. Still, it was a sad end for the soldier who had dedicated his life to bringing power to the powerless. He lost the chance to fulfill his dream of revolution. All he got was his picture on a lousy T-shirt.

  Nkosikazi Nomzamo Madikizela is better known under her married name, Winnie Mandela.

  THE STICKY HISTORIAN

  * * *

  Psst! How would you like to watch acts of sex and violence from over 25 million years ago? All you need is a special specimen of fossilized tree sap—better known as amber. The catch is that the ancients who were caught in the act are. . .well. . .bugs.

  Millions of years ago, while eating, hunting, killing their prey, and even while having sex, insects were trapped in the sticky resin of trees. Over centuries this resin hardened into honey-colored, translucent stones called amber. And when amber contains what the scientists call “inclusions” of anything from flies and mosquitoes to flowers and frogs, it becomes a picture of prehistoric life, frozen in time.

  TINY BUBBLES

  Amber traps air bubbles, too, and scientists think they might hold a clue to the mystery of what killed off the dinosaurs. The bubbles tell us that 67 million years ago, Earth’s air contained 35 percent oxygen to today’s 21 percent. Was that 35 percent oxygen level crucial to dinosaur life? Evidence in amber shows that the oxygen in the atmosphere began to fall significantly at the end of the Cretaceous period—the era when the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth.

  AMBER GOES HOLLYWOOD

  In the movie Jurassic Park, scientists extracted dinosaur blood from the stomach of a mosquito that had been encased in amber. The DNA from that blood was used to clone packs of dinosaurs that roamed the park and terrified everybody, on-screen and in the audience. It should come as no surprise that the science in the movie wasn’t completely accurate. The Jurassic Park amber was discovered at a fictional amber mine in the Dominican Republic. But amber from the Dominican Republic was formed 30 to 50 million years ago, when dinosaurs had already been extinct for more than 15 million years.

  Berengaria became queen when she married Richard I, but never set foot in England.

  WHAT’S OLD IN NEW JERSEY

  But amber that was formed in the age of the dinosaurs does exist. Scientists at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History have collected 93-million-year-old amber fossils at a secret site in New Jersey.

  PREHISTORIC CLONES?

  Scientists don’t know if reality will ever catch up to the movies. A couple of examples: In 1995, researchers at California Polytechnic State University revived Bacillus bacteria spores from the stomach of a bee encased in amber. The bee’s estimated age was somewhere between 25 to 30 million years. If prehistoric bacteria can liv
e again after millions of years, what other ancient creatures might someday revisit Earth? On the other hand, the British Museum of Natural History reports that the DNA stored in amber fossils is too corrupted to use for cloning. Still more scientists disagree and continue to investigate the extraction of DNA from amber fossils and the possible re-creation of prehistoric life.

  CAVEAT AMBER

  The success of Jurassic Park inspired a new worldwide industry in fake amber fossils. Con artists have created fossils out of plastic; they look just like like amber and supposedly contain prehistoric insects, feathers, or the hair of ancient mammals. So, how can you tell if amber is real or not? One good way is to stick a heated needle into your so-called “amber fossil.” If you smell burning plastic, you just bought a fake.

  UNZIPPED

  We thought this was a cool story, but couldn’t fit it in anywhere. It has nothing to do with amber, but with something else that’s sticky. Swiss mountaineer George de Mestral was out hiking with his Irish pointer on a fine summer day in 1948, when he noticed little burrs sticking to his pants and clinging to his dog’s fur. The tenacious burrs inspired de Mestral to race home, neglect his burrinfested dog, and examine the burrs under a microscope. He noticed hundreds of little hooks clinging to the fabric and thought he might be on to something that would replace the zipper. The idea “stuck” in his head—he “clung” to his idea for years and finally had it patented in 1955. It took several years for the public to get “hooked,” but eventually Velcro (a combination of the words “velvet” and “crochet”) “caught on” and became a multimillion dollar industry.

  In 1977, a cannibal declared himself Emperor Bokassa I of the Central African Republic.

  VAN GOGH: AN EAR FOR TROUBLE

  * * *

  Pained expressionist? Embarrassing failure? Insane artist? All of the above? The real story on that ear incident.

  Vincent van Gogh was born in Groot Zundert, Holland, in 1853. From his early youth he was thought to be strange, even freakish. He was a failure at everything he tried, except painting.

  HE’S GOT “PROBLEMS”

  Twice in his life he tried to cultivate romances with women who rejected him outright. The woman he finally took to his bed was a prostitute, a fact that scandalized his family. He chose to throw in his lot with the poor and downtrodden; he completely rejected all aspects of middle-class propriety. He was prone to volatile mood swings and mental breakdowns. A weirdo, plain and simple.

  WASN’T HE THE “EAR” GUY?

  Ask people what they know about van Gogh and you will, more than likely, get some vague reference to an ear-chopping incident. Not surprising, considering he chose to immortalize this chapter in his life with a self-portrait that shows off his heavily bandaged ear. But why did he do it in the first place?

  AU REVOIR, PARIS!

  By 1888, the 35-year-old van Gogh was sadly disillusioned with life in Paris. Besides being a misfit, he was a failure: he couldn’t sell any of his paintings. So he moved to Arles, in the south of France, where he planned to establish an artist’s colony. He invited fellow painter Paul Gauguin to live with him. From the outset, the relationship between the two was volatile to say the least. Van Gogh was a foreigner to all of the normal social graces of decent living—a thing that annoyed the heck out of Gauguin. On Christmas Eve, 1888, the two men got into an argument; the argument became a brawl. Vincent attacked Gauguin with a razor, but Gauguin managed to ward off the blow. Van Gogh fled to his room.

  It nearly bankrupted England to ransom Richard the Lion-Hearted after he was kidnapped.

  EAR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

  Vincent proceeded to get hopelessly drunk. He soon came to regret his fiery display towards Gauguin. In his drunken stupor he concocted a way that he could make amends—he would cut off his ear (yeah, that’s the ticket!) as a show of remorse. Holding a razor in his right hand, he stood before a mirror and sliced through his left ear from the top of the lobe working down at an angle.

  FOR ME? YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE!

  Van Gogh gift-wrapped the severed portion of his ear in a handkerchief and took it down to his local bordello where he, covered in blood, sought out Rachel—a prostitute he had a crush on—and handed her the package. The poor girl fainted, the brothel was thrown into turmoil, and Vincent fled. The police found Vincent asleep in his bed the following morning.

  THE NOT-SO-FUNNY FARM

  He spent the next 12 months in an asylum, but they weren’t big on rehab back then. Two years later he ended his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. His work, of course, and the romantic story of this tortured artist antihero have gone on to become legend.

  EAR ANATOMY

  Pop quiz, hot shot. You listenin’? It’s Audiology 101 and you’ve got the cheat sheet. Here’s everything you need to know.

  External ear: Focus, dude, focus! The external auditory canal and auricle concentrate the sound, kinda like that big horn on old hand-crank record players you see in old-timey movies.

  Middle ear and eardrum: Check out these cool bones! Malleus, incus, and stapes—that’s hammer, anvil, and stirrup, respectively. They form the amplifier in your own internal stereo system.

  Inner ear: This is where the action is. The cochlea is a snailshaped bone which—presto-change-o!—transforms sounds into nerve impulses. All the other stuff in here helps you balance.

  Mastoid air cells: These weird air pockets also help amplify the sound, sort of like an echo chamber. So you really do have a hole in your head after all.

  From 1958 to 1961, Egypt and Syria were one country called the United Arab Republic.

  TO HILL AND GONE

  * * *

  The San Francisco cable car doesn’t just carry people. It also carries the distinction of being an official National Historic Landmark. Here’s the story of how it first came to be.

  On a fateful rainy day in 1869, Andrew S. Hallidie watched as four horses struggled to pull a streetcar up one of San Francisco’s steepest hills. About halfway to the top, one of the horses slipped on the wet cobblestones. The driver applied the brakes, but the chain snapped, and the car slid backward to the bottom, dragging the poor horses to their doom. At that moment, Hallidie decided to do something about it.

  NOTHING ORDINARY ABOUT HIM

  Andrew Hallidie wasn’t just an ordinary bystander. His father was an inventor who held several patents for “wire rope,” the forerunner of wire cable. Young Hallidie had inherited his father’s inventiveness. His sense of adventure had brought him from England to California, where he prospected for gold for a few relatively unsuccessful years, tried blacksmithing, then turned to building bridges, the suspension kind that used lots of his father’s wire rope.

  THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

  Hallidie held a patent on the “Hallidie Ropeway,” a steam-powered cable line he’d invented in gold territory. The ropeway, also called a tramway, transported cars full of ore across mountainous areas on a wire rope that had a tensile strength of 160,000 pounds per square inch. At the time of the streetcar accident, Hallidie lived in San Francisco and owned a company that manufactured—guess what?—wire rope.

  MAN WITH A PLAN

  Hallidie’s idea for a cable-operated streetcar began with laying a moving cable in a groove in the street. He attached a grip to the cable: when it grasped the cable, the car would move forward; when it released, the car would stop. He spent the next couple of years trying to drum up financial backing, during which the project became known as “Hallidie’s folly.” Folly or not, Hallidie finally raised enough money to build an experimental line.

  Idris I was the first and only modern king of Libya. Muammar al-Qaddafi deposed him.

  TRIAL RUN

  At 4 a.m. on the foggy morning of August 2, 1873, Hallidie and a small group of engineers gathered for the first trial run. Hallidie chose the very early hour to minimize his embarrassment if it didn’t work. The driver, known as a gripman, climbed onto the car, but as he looked down,
the fog parted for one dramatic moment and he saw the bottom of the hill far below. He stepped down from the car and said, “I have a wife and kids at home,” as he backed away.

  NOW WHAT?

  No one else volunteered, so Hallidie climbed into the car himself and took hold of the levers that operated the grip. The car glided smoothly down the hill. When it reached the bottom, he turned the car around, and made it back up the hill—all without mishap. A Frenchman in a nightcap who had watched from a window threw a bouquet of flowers onto the roof of the cable car; he was the only member of the public to witness the maiden voyage of the San Francisco cable car.