Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  King Philip was prepared to accept the terms of surrender, but Richard rejected them outright. The portrait that some historians have painted of the gallant king who behaved with courtesy and a certain amount of respect for his enemies has no real foundation. Richard hadn’t come all the way to the Holy Land to mount a difficult, costly siege, only to let his enemies walk away scot-free. About 6,000 Saracens from Acre surrendered and were taken prisoner. At Richard’s order, more than 3,000 of the Muslims—men, women, and children—were executed on a hill near the city, in full view of Saladin and his men.

  PUT UP YOUR DUKE!

  Richard installed himself in a palace in Acre and flew his battle flag. When a minor player, Duke Leopold of Austria, set up his flag beside Richard’s, soldiers under Richard’s command tore down the flag and tossed it into a ditch. Leopold was offended by this outrageous insult—and Richard had a new mortal enemy.

  A KING’S RANSOM

  On July 31, 1191, King Philip left Acre by ship and returned to France, leaving most of his army behind in Richard’s command. Richard pressed on and won back considerable portions of the Holy Land for Christianity. But in the end he decided not to attempt an attack on Jerusalem. He considered the city impregnable.

  Worse yet, Richard fell into hostile hands on his return journey to Europe. Interestingly enough, these were not Muslim hands. Instead, they turned out to be the vengeful hands of a certain Duke Leopold of Austria. With a keen eye on the bottom line, Leopold released his royal captive only after England had forked over the staggering sum of 100,000 pounds—quite literally a king’s ransom.

  IN THE LOOP

  Loopholes were originally those slit-type windows in the battlements of castles. They were wider on the inside, so archers could shoot from them while being protected by the very narrow opening on the outside. They became obsolete when gunpowder made castle and city walls unimportant as protective devices.

  Even though no one could have escaped through them, the word came to mean an outlet or means of escape. Of course, today a loophole is a clever way out of a situation, especially one that has to do with the law.

  English and Portuguese troops have never faced each other in combat.

  DON’T LET YOUR DAUGHTERS GROW UP TO BE POETS

  * * *

  Lady Ada Lovelace brought a poetic perspective to mathematics. Maybe that’s why she could work out complicated computer programming before a computer had even been built.

  Lady Byron was terrified that her daughter Ada might turn out like her father. When Annabella Milbanke married the poet Lord Byron in 1815, he was already famous as the creator of the brooding, defiant romantic hero. He was as deeply melancholic and determined to follow his own passions as the characters he created.

  “MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW”

  That’s Lady Caroline Lamb’s oft-quoted appraisal of Byron, and, as one of his lovers, Lady Lamb ought to know. Byron’s amorous dalliances also included his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and a long string of other ill-advised love affairs.

  A year after they were married, Lady Byron went home to her parents, taking baby daughter Ada with her. In spite of her husband’s furious protests, she managed to get a legal separation. Stories about Byron’s affairs and rumored bisexuality aroused so much public moral indignation that Byron left England, never to return. Taking no chances that her daughter might grow up to be a poet, Lady Byron hired a series of tutors to educate little Ada in mathematics and science, as well as reading and writing. By the time she was 13, Ada knew more about math than her tutors did.

  HOW TO TRAP A MAN WITH MATH

  It wasn’t as odd as you think for girls to study math in the mid-1800s. Magazines like the Ladies Diary encouraged women to develop their wit as well as their beauty, and actually had special sections that posed math problems. (Imagine trying that on the Elle gang.) And women were regularly writing for scientific publications around the same time.

  His pacifist parents raised Dwight David Eisenhower to hate war.

  ANALYTICAL ENGINE

  At a dinner party one night, Ada—by then married to the earl of Lovelace, and with three young children—heard inventor Charles Babbage talk about his calculating machine: the Analytical Engine. She was hooked. The engine wasn’t finished, and wouldn’t be built in their lifetimes. Though neither she nor Babbage would ever see it, they both understood how it could work.

  She translated an Italian article about it, and added a footnote of her own that discussed the difference between a simple calculating machine and the Analytical Engine—a difference like that between pocket calculators and computers today. Babbage suggested she add more of her own ideas, which turned out to be three times as long as the original article and were published in 1843 in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, a serious science journal. Apparently Ada Lovelace inherited something from her father after all. Her powerful imagination allowed her to make leaps beyond the available information. Aware that Babbage had based his designs on a weaving loom, she wrote in a letter, “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

  CREATING A COMPUTER IN HER MIND

  Lady Lovelace described how the engine could produce important sequences of numbers, how it could deal with symbolic sequences (such as algebra), how it could have a memory, and how subroutines could be built in for special tasks. She predicted it could be used to compose music and produce graphics. She even considered artificial intelligence, and she explained why A.I. wouldn’t work. In fact, her ideas were so good that a lot of people consider her the first computer programmer. (In 1979, a U.S. Department of Defense software language was named after her.)

  After her work on the Analytical Engine, Lady Ada’s social life broadened to include a wide range of interesting contemporaries: Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Wheatstone, Sir David Brewster, and her old pal Charles Babbage. But she suffered from recurring illnesses. Unfortunately, she turned out to be like her famous father in another way. Like Byron, Ada Lovelace died at the very young age of 36.

  Hillary Clinton was once a Republican, and campaigned for right-winger Barry Goldwater.

  MAGNIFICENT FAILURE

  * * *

  This page, like billions of other printed pages read worldwide, owes its existence to a bankrupt, small-time German businessman.

  Johann Gutenberg borrowed 150 gulden from his cousin in 1448 and set up the world’s first book-printing operation in his hometown, Mainz, Germany. He had no idea of how rapidly his idea would spread. By 1500, more than a thousand print shops in Europe were using his technique, and several million books had been printed. Yet Gutenberg’s business never printed more than 300 copies a day, and by 1458 he was bankrupt.

  FASTER AND CHEAPER

  Gutenberg never planned to produce large editions or flood the market with bestsellers. He just wanted to find a way to compete with expensive, handwritten copies of the Bible, and other sacred texts, for rich clients. This work was traditionally done on parchment made from sheepskin and was a slow, pricey process. Gutenberg’s idea was to mechanically turn out a cheaper alternative.

  EAST MEETS WEST

  At the time of Gutenberg’s big idea, printing was being done on a limited scale using the Chinese invention of woodblock. In Europe, woodblock printing had been used to print patterns on fabric, pictures, and then pages of books. The process involved engraving each page on a block of wood—in reverse!

  Neither Germany nor Italy were united as modern countries until the 1800s.

  JUST HIS TYPE

  Woodblock printing was difficult, time-consuming, and the quality of printing was poor. It just wasn’t a moneymaker. So Gutenberg invented a printing technology of his own—moveable metal type. By setting a standard size and format, Gutenberg could design a new method for producing letters. Rather than engrave each page individually on a block, he made hard metal punches for letters. The punches were used to form molds in soft copper. Molten lead
was then poured into the molds to make lead type. The lead letters were stored in different drawers, then lined up in wooden forms to make up a page. The forms could be used over and over and disassembled after a job was done so the letters could be reused. Gutenberg also used good-quality paper rather than expensive parchment. This paper had been available in Europe since the 12th century. Cheaper than parchment, it was made from rags and wood fiber. He made ink from soot, linseed oil, and egg whites to produce a solid black print on moistened paper. A wine press squeezed the paper and type together, and this system was used until the 1800s, when an iron press was developed.

  BESTSELLER—180 COPIES SOLD

  Aiming to compete with handwritten manuscripts, Gutenberg wanted each book to be an exclusive, luxury product. After printing, his books were hand-finished with painted initial letters and illustrations. Although he’d invented the tool for mass production of books whose pages could be exactly alike, the world wasn’t ready for them. If Gutenberg had mass-produced cheap texts, he couldn’t have sold them—most people in Europe couldn’t read.

  Gutenberg’s bestselling book was the famous Gutenberg 42-line Bible. It was so clear and legible, some readers said sorcery was involved. Printing came to be known as “the black art” because of its magical results and because printers got covered in ink. Printers’ assistants were called “printer’s devils”; the term continued in use until hot-metal printing disappeared in the 1970s.

  After his business failed in 1458, he opened a second print shop in 1459, but this closed by 1462. Gutenberg’s 42-line Bibles are priceless now. He made about 180 of them, but few have survived. Still, Gutenberg’s invention survived. As different Christian churches tried to establish their own versions of the Bible in the following centuries, printing came into its own. Churches and learning institutions ordered huge numbers of books. In Germany the spread of printed books (especially Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible) helped establish a standard written language in Germany. Gutenberg’s invention was changing the world. People were learning to read.

  A BESTSELLER WITH NO ROYALTIES

  Gutenberg died in 1468 without profiting from his amazing invention, but we reap the profits every time we read a book.

  One of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons was named Kermit.

  WHAT WERE THE WARS OF THE ROSES?

  * * *

  When King Richard II of England got back from a trip to Ireland, there was somebody else sitting on his throne.

  The Wars of the Roses were fought between two branches of the Plantagenet family, the Yorks and the Lancasters. The Yorks ruled Britain for almost 250 years, from 1154 to 1399—and were successful enough to add Scotland and Wales to the list of countries under British rule. But In 1399 Henry Boling-broke, of the Lancaster branch, took the throne from his cousin King Richard II, a York.

  OUR STORY BEGINS. . .

  Henry threw Richard in prison, where he died, possibly by starving himself. The whole episode ticked off Richard’s branch of the family to no end. They kept pretty quiet because Henry, now King Henry IV, and his son, Henry V, were popular kings (the younger added lots of territory to the British Kingdom including most of France). Tensions were kept to a minimum between the Lancastrians and Yorkists for a long time after Henry IV took the throne.

  REMEMBER THE RICHARD!

  It was during the reign of the next king, Henry VI, that England lost control of her holdings in France (thanks in part to Joan of Arc) and unrest began to brew. Add to that questions of Henry’s sanity (cuckoo!) and you had real trouble. Around 1452 or so, it was remembered how Henry VI’s grandfather had taken the throne from Richard II. That was all the Yorkists needed.

  “WE’RE A-FEUDIN’!”

  The two branches of the Plantagenet family started carrying on. They sniped at and feuded with each other whenever time and distance permitted. The Lancasters assumed they were the rightful rulers because, let’s face it, possession is nine-tenths of the law. The York side aimed to even the score for Richard’s sake, and for the next 20 years, Merrie Olde England wasn’t all that merry. Each skirmish between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists was another War of the Roses.

  St. Patrick wasn’t Irish. He was a Brit kidnapped by Irish pirates.

  THE TIDE TURNS

  Finally in 1471, something came of all this feuding. Henry VI was finally deposed (and probably murdered by the Yorks). The Yorks took over and put their own Edward IV on the throne. Things were decidedly merry again until Edward died, leaving behind only an infant son. His name was also Edward, naturally, and he took over the throne as Edward V. But because he was a baby, Edward Jr., wasn’t particularly intimidating. The boy’s uncle, Richard, one of the folks not intimidated in the least by the boy king, seized the throne as Richard III and little Eddie was never seen or heard from again. Richard III ruled until 1485, during which there were more skirmishes between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, and bad feelings grew throughout the kingdom.

  SO LONG, RICHARD

  Richard III was generally disliked, and you know what happens when subjects aren’t happy with their monarch. On August 22, 1485, Henry Tudor defeated King Richard III’s forces at the Battle of Bosworth (which is famous because it signaled the end of the Wars of the Roses and because it only lasted two hours, which must be some kind of record). Crowned King Henry VII, he married Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward IV, to unite the two branches of the family. Their son was the famous Henry VIII.

  SHAKESPEARE GETS INTO THE ACT

  If you’re still confused about all the Henrys, Richards, Plantagenets, Yorks, Lancasters, and Tudors—not to mention the Edwards—you’re not alone. Shakespeare devoted seven plays to trying to set the record straight as to the history of the Wars of the Roses. The plays, titled after the Henrys and Richards involved in the wars, and are known as Shakespeare’s history cycle.

  BUT WHY THE WARS OF THE ROSES?

  Those of you who’ve been paying attention may be asking yourselves, “Yes, but why were they called the Wars of the Roses?” Very simple. Because each family, or “house,” had a symbol: the Lancaster’s was the red rose, the York’s was the white. When Henry VII took the throne, he designed what’s called the “Tudor Rose,” a rose with alternating red and white petals signifying the unification of the houses of York and Lancaster.

  It was probably Francis Hopkinson, not Betsy Ross, who designed the U.S. flag.

  PROVEN WRONG BY HISTORY: PART III

  * * *

  Gives new meaning to eating one’s words. Want fries with that?

  OIL DRILLING “ Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.”

  —Drillers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his oil-drilling project in 1859.

  BACTERIOLOGY “ Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.”

  —Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at France’s Toulouse University, 1872.

  SURGERY “

  The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.”

  —Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873.

  THE STOCK MARKET “ Stocks have reached what looks like a permanent high plateau.”

  —I. Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

  FEDERAL EXPRESS “

  The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.”

  —A Yale University Management Professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable, overnight, delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express.)

  EVERYTHING ELSE“

  “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

  —Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

  Until 1832, Old Sarum had two members in Britain’s parliament, but nobody lived there.

  WHEN CHILDHOOD WAS BORN

  * * *<
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  Forget Sesame Street. Forget cute. Forget “Let Mommy kiss your boo-boo.” There were days when boys couldn’t be boys, and a girl didn’t enjoy being a girl.

  SHORT PEOPLE GOT NO REASON

  Once upon a time, there was no such thing as childhood. There was infancy and, oh, sure, there were a lot of short people who looked like what we know as children, but once they hit five years old or so, they were expected to behave like adults. As soon as a kid was able, he or she would be apprenticed to the family business, be it a farm, bakery, or blacksmith’s shop. By seven years old—what the Roman Catholic church considers the “age of reason”—children had reached full adulthood.

  AW, QUIT YER WHININ’!

  Sociologists agree that a typical 10-year-old in almost any period before the 20th century was more mature and independent than today’s 25-year-old. The concept of childhood, and the associated protections and innocence, didn’t surface until the 15th and 16th centuries, and then only among the privileged classes. The idea took centuries to filter down to the rest of society.